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This question is not a technical but a historical one. I was just thinking today that I've also thought of Java as the "first" language to use exception handling, until I realized that my reason for thinking this way is probably because Java was the first language I encountered that used it, but I had no historical data to back up that conclusion. Nowadays exception handling is commonplace in all modern languages, so I'm just wondering: does anyone know when it first started being widely used? And what language was the first to start using it?
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Arithmetic overflow executed two instructions at address 0, which could transfer control or fix up the result. Software exception handling developed in the 1960s and 1970s. LISP 1.5 (1958-1961) allowed exceptions to be raised by the ERROR pseudo-function, similarly to errors raised by the interpreter or compiler.
Exception handling is the process of responding to unwanted or unexpected events when a computer program runs. Exception handling deals with these events to avoid the program or system crashing, and without this process, exceptions would disrupt the normal operation of a program.
A new pair of primitives, CATCH and THROW , was introduced into MacLisp in June 1972 [emphasis mine] so that ERRSET could be reserved for its intended use of error trapping.
An Exception is an error that happens during the execution of a program. Whenever there is an error, Python generates an exception that could be handled. It basically prevents the program from getting crashed.
Programming Languages: Principles and Practice, 2nd edition, by Kenneth C. Louden (a notable textbook on programming languages) notes that "Exception handling was pioneered by the language PL/I in the 1960s and significantly advanced in CLU in the 1970s. However, it was only in the 1980s and early 1990s that design questions were largely resolved" (283).
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Exception handling really goes back to even before programming languages; at first, it was a hardware mechanism for trapping error conditions (those that caused an execution halt) and optionally branching to a subroutine.
For example, the VAX CPU could detect when a virtual address that had no physical mapping was accessed, and call into a subroutine that either loaded the appropriate page from swap, or halted the program. The mechanism is essentially the same in modern processors (look up "translation lookaside buffer"). So in a sense the first language to have exceptions was assembly.
The earliest structured languages to have exceptions appear to be PL/I and CLU (see Mipadi above).
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