Question

public class StackTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        show();
        System.out.print("welcome back to maain");
        display();
    }
    static void show(){
        try{
            show();    //recursion
        }catch(StackOverflowError e){
            System.out.print("error cought");
        }
    }
    static void display(){
        System.out.print("after stack overflow error");
    }
}

In this program an StackOverflowError occurs but gets handled and the program does not terminated abnormally. why?
You can see this at http://ideone.com/vwSav

Answer 1

You can handle Errors because they are Throwable just like Exceptions.

Errors are designed to indicate problems outside your program’s control, like OutOfMemoryError and StackOverflowError, but you can define your own errors, too.

Perhaps you are thinking that, or heard that, OutOFMemoryError can be caught but there’s no guarantee you’ll have enough space to execute the handler, so errors must in general not be something you can catch. In your case, though, you got away with it. No language rules were violated in the catching and handling of this error.

The real question is, should you catch them? Normally when an error, as opposed to an exception, is thrown, your application is very likely in an inconsistent state, making recovery a crapshoot at best. So be really, really careful. Better to forget it and let the app die though, since whatever is running after the handler is not guaranteed to be something you’d want to run.