High priority enhancement because of existing traps.

If in a debug session an uncaught exception is about to be thrown in a
application then the debugger should treat the exception in very much the same
way as a breakpoint.

I remember there was such support in Sun's Java Workshop IDE.
I was overwhelmed by that particular functionality in JWS at the time, maybe it
was ahead of its time and out of line with the rest of it.

Today I am overwhelmed by the awsome functionality of NetBeans as a whole which
is 10 times better but I am missing exception support for a very practical reason.

Please consider and run the following testcase and you will instantly recognise
the critical need.
The testcase alone is shocking, and the fact that the NetBeans debugger does not
offer any help is a little disappointing.

To appreciate the full imact please consider an application that uses a 3rd
party component such as a relational database engine that throws an error and
the application does not even notice.
Now you have to debug this thing and the debugger simply throws the towel.
Lots of swaering in this scenario I promise.

Here's the testcase:

class Test{

    public static void main(String[] args){

        int status = 1;

        try{
            status = getNumber();
            System.err.println("status = " + status);
        }// try

        catch(NumberFormatException ex){
            // This Exception is never thrown; only used to
            // have a basic try/catch block
            System.err.println("NumberFormatException caught");
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }// catch

        finally{
            if(status != 0){
                System.err.println("Test failed - number not set. Any stack
trace printed?");
            }//
            System.out.println("Closing down.");
            System.exit(status);
        }// finally

    }// method


    private static int getNumber() throws NumberFormatException{
        if(true){
            throw new NullPointerException();
        }// if
        return 0;
    }// method


}// class