Exceptionally Lazy Messages

In a perfecter world, wouldn't Java exceptions have been better defined with their messages as by-name arguments?:

  class Throwable (message: => String, cause: Option[Throwable] = None)

Not that that's Java syntax, but you know what I mean.

Any number of times, I've gone to throw an exception with a nice detailed message, but confused myself by getting an exception during the construction of the message instead. The latter exception obscures the occurrence of the problem that would have thrown the former exception.

Maybe I'm the only one who writes message-building code complicated enough to have bugs of its own, but maybe not. I'm just sayin'.