Flow Control - SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java Platform SE6 - page 248

As with most errors in Java, you cannot recover from an ExceptionInInitializerError
because there is no way to catch it.
StackOverflowError
A StackOverflowError is thrown by the JVM when the method call stack overfl ows,
typically due to method recursion that does not end. The following example causes a
StackOverflowError due to its infi nite recursion:
1. public class StackOverflowDemo {
2. private int x = 0;
3.
4. public void go() {
5. System.out.println(++x);
6. go();
7. }
8. public static void main(String [] args) {
9. new StackOverflowDemo().go();
10. }
11. }
The go method invokes itself recursively on line 6, so eventually the method call stack
will consume all of its allotted memory, causing a StackOverflowError . Running the
previous program generates the following stack trace:
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.StackOverflowError
at sun.nio.cs.SingleByteEncoder.encodeArrayLoop(SingleByteEncoder.
java:91)
at sun.nio.cs.SingleByteEncoder.encodeLoop(SingleByteEncoder.java:130)
at java.nio.charset.CharsetEncoder.encode(CharsetEncoder.java:544)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.implWrite(StreamEncoder.java:252)
at sun.nio.cs.StreamEncoder.write(StreamEncoder.java:106)
at java.io.OutputStreamWriter.write(OutputStreamWriter.java:190)
at java.io.BufferedWriter.flushBuffer(BufferedWriter.java:111)
at java.io.PrintStream.newLine(PrintStream.java:495)
at java.io.PrintStream.println(PrintStream.java:687)
at StackOverflowDemo.go(StackOverflowDemo.java:5)
at StackOverflowDemo.go(StackOverflowDemo.java:6)
at StackOverflowDemo.go(StackOverflowDemo.java:6)
The output actually displays the last line (the call to go on line 6) in the stack trace for
each time the method is invoked, which is several thousand calls to go . You can catch a
StackOverflowError and recover from it, but that would be an unusual situation because
the error is typically avoided by using proper code.