Bad things can happen even to good programs. When they do, you must confront the potentially messy, unpredictable, and painful topic of error handling. You can take some consolation in knowing that every developer goes through it. Also, the Rogue Wave class libraries use an extensive and complete error handling model to alleviate your distress.

In the Essential Math Module, errors are divided into three categories:

The difference between them depends on who made the error: the programmer, the final end user, or some external/internal software error. Each type of error requires a different type of handling. The following sections describe these approaches and when you can change how they are handled.