I filed the following enhancement request to Sun. Would like to hear
opinion about how useful implementing this feature would be.

Synopsis:    Need column numbers in stack traces
Description:
A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
Stack traces contain only line numbers and in certain cases line number
alone is not sufficient for figuring out where exactly an exception
occurred. Consider the following line of code.

value = getItem().getRelatedItem().getName().getValue();

If the above line throws a NullPointerException, we have no clue
whether it is the getItem, getRelatedItem or the getName that is
returning a null value. So providing just the line number is not
sufficiently helpful in narrowing down the problem. If the stack trace
also contains the column number where the null was encountered, it will
be really helpful.

Though the above code could be rewritten to several lines so that we
can clearly identify which method returned null, there are tons of such
existing code and changing them all will be an unreasonably complex
task.