Run-Time Errors

Way back in Section 1.3 I talked about run-time errors, which are errors that don't appear until a program has started running. In Java run-time errors are called exceptions.

So far, you probably haven't seen many run-time errors, because we haven't been doing many things that can cause one. Well, now we are. If you use the charAt command and you provide an index that is negative or greater than length-1, you will get an exception: specifically, a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException. Try it and see how it looks.

If your program causes an exception, it prints an error message indicating the type of exception and where in the program it occurred. Then the program terminates.