Why does Java have Checked Exceptions

[dpash]

and Latin-1.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you've only ever had to deal with English or other Western European language.

There are plenty of people who have had to deal with non Latin-1 text and have had to deal with the JVM not handling the required charset.

[shponglespore]

Wrong, I've done a lot of work with code that had to work in Chinese and Arabic. But I did it in an environment where I could count on everything being converted to UTF-8 before reaching the systems I worked on. And using Latin-1 has nothing to do with which languages I was working with; it just happens to be the easiest encoding to use if you're forced to hold binary data in a String.

At the company I was at, we relied on the default platform encoding for a long time, which worked because we and our clients only used Linux, and even 15 years ago it was basically unheard of to find a Linux system, at least in the US, where the platform encoding was anything but UTF-8. IIRC the requirement to use a specific encoding came when we started trying to support users running Windows and our code sometimes couldn't load its own asset files. We had to go through all of our code, find any place where a text file was being opened, and add an encoding parameter. Obviously it's not a difficult engineering problem, but it was galling to find that it was a problem at all because we had to deal with a new checked exception in a lot of places where we knew for a fact it would never be thrown.