I need clarifications on these terms exception and directives @Try, @finally, @throw.

Question

What is the general reason an exception occur? When an exception appears, does the program terminate immediately or keep running?
I'm guessing @try is the program message I'm testing. Is that right?
After @catch either log an error message, clean up, etc, what does the @finally block do? The book I'm reading says that @finally determines whether or not a statement in an @try throws an exception. But isn't that an unnecessary step because with or without it, we could tell whether there was an exception based on the program terminating abruptly?
What's the throw directive? The books says it enables you to throw your own exception. But I find that really confusing. Does that mean I could somehow create an exception and test it out?

I would really appreciate it if you could answer at least one of the questions for me. Thank you.

Answer 1 · 2013-04-10T14:22:18Z

April 10, 2013 2:22pm

Firstly, the try/catch/finally approach is not a preferred approach in Objective-C - you simply do not need it as libraries seldom throw exceptions. The widely used convention is that of a delegate which has an error method callback, or perhaps notifications for more general failures.

That said. Here's a general explanation for try/catch/finally. Let's assume we have a custom subclass of NSArray and have a method called createSubclassOfArray to initialize and allocate that array.

- (id) createSubclassOfArray {
   @try {
       // try to allocate and initialize custom array 
       // return subclass of NSArray
    }
    @catch (NSException *theException) {        
       // Catches the exception and throws it to the caller of this method
        @throw; // implicitly throws theException
    }
}

// somewhere else in your code

id array;
@try {
   // Try to create the custom array
    array = [self createSubclassOfArray];
}
@catch (NSException *theException) {        
    // couldn't create custom array so just create NSMutableArray
    array = [NSMutableArray array];
}
@finally {
    // No matter what happens add an item to the array
    // This block executes whether or not there was an exception
   [array addObject:@"First Item"];
}

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Daniel Lee

Daniel Lee

I need clarifications on these terms exception and directives @Try, @finally, @throw.

1 Answer

Amit Bijlani

Amit Bijlani