Exception Handling versus Fault Tolerance

For most non-trivial programs it is not satisfactory just to terminate the program with an error message. Consider the situation where the program is a word processor. An error message saying e.g. that some internal register has overflowed is in general not meaningful to a user of such a word processor. Another example is a flight reservation system. Such a system runs over a very long period of time, and it would not be acceptable if e.g. a table overflow simply resulted in an error message and a subsequent termination of the program.