Yamini,
You can think about exceptions as being one of three types:
Errors you expect to happen at some point. You should handle these. Most of the time these will be direct subclasses of Exception, but not RuntimeException, so the compiler will force you to catch or declare these.Errors you know may happen, but don't expect. These are the RuntimeException-subclasses exceptions. You generally don't worry about these unless there are specific instances that you might want to cover (like NumberFormatException) if explicity stated by functions. Sometimes you won't even know what RuntimeExceptions can be thrown by code you call.Lastly, there are the RuntimeErrors that can be thrown. These usually deal with things way out of your control, so you just let them do whatever they want. Examples being running out of memory or other JVM issues. To answer your question though: any unchecked exception that isn't caught and handled by some catch block somewhere will force the JVM to quit with the usual stack trace and chaos.
[ April 16, 2004: Message edited by: Nathaniel Stoddard ]
Nathaniel Stodard<br />SCJP, SCJD, SCWCD, SCBCD, SCDJWS, ICAD, ICSD, ICED