exceptions in static initializers

Ever so often I find side remarks in
postings that exceptions in static
initializers are a pain/bad/hard to
track/etc. I wonder why this seems
to be so common?

Let me elaborate: There are two
completely different cases of
exceptions:

a) The exception is triggered by a
bug, i.e. the situation is completely
under the control of the programmer and
he messed it up: The line

"bla".matches("(");

will result in a PatternSyntaxException
and the programmer should have known better.

b) The exception is a true exception, i.e.
the programmer has no chance at all to
prevent it to happen:

"bla".matches(getRegexpFromUser())

I would most probably not write a static
initializer where (b) might happen, but
case (a) exceptions are quite common.

I simply write then

static {
try {
// do stuff which should not
// throw except for a bug
} catch( SomeException e ) {
throw new Error("bug", e);
}
}

Now if I screwed up, I get the "bug"
exception with a nice stack trace.
What is wrong about it?

The only thing I could think of is
that unit testing is a bit strange
for those initializers.

Harald.

.

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