dybdahl/cloudname — comment on commit 8b748e66ad7eead553693c179e6bdc57ca360475
File: cn/src/main/java/org/cloudname/Cloudname.java line 36
By borud:

How does it signal failure? There is nothing in the method signature that indicates how failure is signalled and how the reason for the failure is communicated to the caller.

This one is not incredibly easy. If you make it a boolean, it can tell you that something went wrong, but not what. If you signal it by throwing an exception you increase the footprint of the API, but not necessarily by that much. It should probably throw a CloudnameException (document by adding a @throws doc clause) and the specific exception for claimed coordinate should probably be CloudnameException.AlreadyClaimed