Question

Sometimes Eclipse comes up saying ‘hey you should debug this line!!!’ but doesn’t actually close the program. I can then continue to play big two, and even go through the same events that caused the error the first time and get another error box to pop up!

The bug is simple, I’ll fix it, I just want to know why some bugs are terminal and some are not? What’s the difference?

Answer 1

Programming mistakes can be categorized in these categories:

1. Compile-time errors, which are caught by the compiler at the time of compilation and without correcting them, it’s not possible to run the program at all.
2. Run-time errors, which are not caught by the compiler but put the computer in a situation which it cannot figure out what to do by itself, such as unhandled exceptions. Most of the times, this will cause the program to fail at run time and crash.
3. Logical errors, which are perfectly acceptable by the computer, as it is a valid computer program, but does not produce the result you expect. There is no way a computer can catch them since computer doesn’t know your intention.

In practice, it’s a good thing to make errors be as deadly as possible as soon as they occur. It makes us find them sooner and correct them easier. This is why in ‘safer’ languages such as Java, we have checked exceptions, and unhandled exceptions will cause the application to crash immediately instead of going on and probably producing incorrect results.