Question

While playing with exception handling in Java I noticed that no exception is thrown when
some illegal runtime operation is being done in the catch block in Java.

Is that a bug in the language or am I missing something ?
Could someone please look into it – as in why no exception is thrown from the catch block.

public class DivideDemo {

    @SuppressWarnings("finally")

    public static int divide(int a, int b){

    try{
       a = a/b;
    }
    catch(ArithmeticException e){
       System.out.println("Recomputing value");

       /* excepting an exception in the code below*/
       b=0;
       a = a/b;
       System.out.println(a);
    }
    finally{
      System.out.println("hi");
      return a;
    }
  }    
  public static void main(String[] args) {
     System.out.println("Dividing two nos");
     System.out.println(divide(100,0));
  }

}

Answer 1

Is that a bug in the language or am I missing something ?

It’s because you have return statement in your finally block:

finally {
  System.out.println("hi");
  return a;
}

This return statement effectively swallows exception and “overrides it” with returned value.

See also

• Java try-finally return design question