Hmm. Maybe I'm just picky, but I kinda like things being explicit if they might fail. It seems slightly nasty that a call to parse could throw a RuntimeException. It means that either the code calling it has to know it may throw (in which case why not make it explicit with a checked exception), or deal with the fact that it will die completely if one of these (albeit rare) io/parseexceptions is thrown. I dunno, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here...