Exception handling try catch inside catch

Question

I recently came across code written by a fellow programmer in which he had a try-catch statement inside a catch!

Please forgive my inability to paste the actual code, but what he did was something similar to this:

try
{
 //ABC Operation
}
catch (ArgumentException ae)
{
   try
   {
      //XYZ Operation
   }
   catch (IndexOutOfRangeException ioe)
   {
      //Something
   }
}

I personally feel that it is some of the poorest code I have ever seen! On a scale of 1 to 10, how soon do you think I should go and give him a piece of my mind, or am I over-reacting?

EDIT: What he is actually doing in the catch, he is performing some operations which can/should be done when the initial try fails. My problem is with having a clean code and maintainability. Delegating the exception from the first catch to a different function or the calling function would be OK, but adding more code which may or may not throw an exception into the first catch, is what I felt was not good. I try to avoid multiple stacked "if-loop" statements, I found this equally bad.

Exception handling try catch inside catch

3 Answers