[coldtea]

>Granted, it is very rare that you can/should recover from nullpointer or OOB exceptions anyway.

Actually it can be quite common, especially in complex web / network programs with many components. In Java such errors do not corrupt memory like in C, and since they are isolated, no reason not to continue the operation of the overall program. The error could just be due to a resource not being found, or faulty input coming from outside -- that is, nothing that prevents you from continuing to work on other requests.

That's somewhat like Erlang handles the case, if I am not mistaken.