>
> Obviously you *could* do that and if you wanted to explicitly  
> handle a case of the key not being found in your collection it  
> might be the best thing to do.  An 'ifAbsent:' block is great when  
> there is a simple failure case and a simple failure response. I  
> don't think it is so useful when things get more complex and there  
> are many possible problems to handle.
>
> For an in-memory OrderedCollection, at:ifAbsent: is extremely  
> useful and since pretty much the only thing that can go wrong is  
> the index being outside the collection bounds it covers the problem  
> nicely. For a caching collection hiding a connection to a database  
> I suspect that there are more things that can blow up and more  
> nuanced responses that one would like to provide.

Indeed, I think that this was with the vision that Java was a  
language for internet (wild and unknown area) that lot of exceptions  
introduced and stressed.

Stef