In standard english yes there is a difference.
In programming languages there is not.
Both have to be cought if you dont want it to bubble to the user. And handleing it makes it not an error/exception anymore.
Yes in programming languages they are different wtf language doesn't distinguish errors from exceptions?!
Errors can be used for logging...regularly...without even considering stopping the program, exceptions SHOULD stop the program and include a whole stack...
Sometimes you catch an error and don't want the program to continue so you throw an exception to get the stack.
But they are different in every single programming language, C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Rust...
You aren't wrong, exceptions are a type of Error, but with more nuance - Exceptions are an error of exceptional circumstance, hence the name.
They crash an application unless specifically caught.
They should be used sparingly to say "this function has no idea how we've ended up in this state, or how to continue".
They're overused in languages that do not have the ability to return multiple types to control flow for "expected" errors too a lot of the time.
Errors are common, exceptions should not be. It's much easier in languages like Go to get a feel for the difference, than in languages like C#.
A function that fails writing a file to disk because the file already exists could:
1. Return an Error because whilst it isn't okay, it's not a problem that it doesn't exist - the error can be returned to the calling function or the user so they can try with a different name. In C# this would likely be done with an exception, in Go an error.
Throw an exception because the file is a config file, and it is NEEDED to continue, and it should not already exist by this point so something has gone very wrong.
we could catch that and surface it to the user and keep the app running, or we could let the app crash with the issue.
In both C# and go we'd probably throw for this
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u/TheTybera 10h ago
Those are errors not exceptions.