In your case I think that you should consider the use of IllegalArgumentException it will save you a headache in the long run. When it comes to looking at code and trying to work out what broke and why NPEs are very well understood and very useful in debugging, but IAE describes your situation better.
The bottom line is that you have asked a question with no right or wrong answer and you will find very strong opinions form both camps - here is a good example of a short debate with many convincing opinions on StackOverflow StackOverflow
I'm not sure why the conversation around the clone method, if you want to extend ArrayList without clone you should throw the standard CloneNotSupportedException.
A similar discussion was had the other day, are you sure that you want to extend ArrayList at all, would you be better off having a private ArrayList member variable, delegating the methods that you care about to it and not exposing the others.
In your case I think that you should consider the use of IllegalArgumentException it will save you a headache in the long run. When it comes to looking at code and trying to work out what broke and why NPEs are very well understood and very useful in debugging, but IAE describes your situation better.
The bottom line is that you have asked a question with no right or wrong answer and you will find very strong opinions form both camps - here is a good example of a short debate with many convincing opinions on StackOverflow
I'm not sure why the conversation around the clone method, if you want to extend ArrayList without clone you should throw the standard CloneNotSupportedException.
A similar discussion was had the other day, are you sure that you want to extend ArrayList at all, would you be better off having a private ArrayList member variable, delegating the methods that you care about to it and not exposing the others.
In your case I think that you should consider the use of IllegalArgumentException it will save you a headache in the long run. When it comes to looking at code and trying to work out what broke and why NPEs are very well understood and very useful in debugging, but IAE describes your situation better.
The bottom line is that you have asked a question with no right or wrong answer and you will find very strong opinions form both camps - here is a good example of a short debate with many convincing opinions on StackOverflow
I'm not sure why the conversation around the clone method, if you want to extend ArrayList without clone you should throw the standard CloneNotSupportedException.
A similar discussion was had the other day, are you sure that you want to extend ArrayList at all, would you be better off having a private ArrayList member variable, delegating the methods that you care about to it and not exposing the others.
In your case I think that you should consider the use of IllegalArgumentException it will save you a headache in the long run. When it comes to looking at code and trying to work out what broke and why NPEs are very well understood and very useful in debugging, but IAE describes your situation better.
The bottom line is that you have asked a question with no right or wrong answer and you will find very strong opinions form both camps - here is a good example of a short debate with many convincing opinions on StackOverflow
I'm not sure why the conversation around the clone method, if you want to extend ArrayList without clone you should throw the standard CloneNotSupportedException.
A similar discussion was had the other day, are you sure that you want to extend ArrayList at all, would you be better off having a private ArrayList member variable, delegating the methods that you care about to it and not exposing the others.