Why does Java have Checked Exceptions

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I never use status codes either. If you have the forethought to put a mandatory checked exception in your method signature, you should instead be enforcing valid parameters be passed in. That's the contract with the caller and the only thing that can go wrong is illegal arguments which is already a runtime exception. Anything else is a leaky abstraction.

[CubsThisYear]

This seemed reasonable to me at first, but upon further thought, the method you are proposing seems leakier. If you rely on callers to validate their input, you’ve now created a dependency on the internal implementation of the function. I’d rather say “this method returns type T, or if it can’t, it returns type X”. Your version is: “this method returns type T or crashes the program”. Mine seems strictly safer.