In addition to what the other commenters have mentioned, it should also be noted that a kernel panic occurs whenever an error is encountered by the operating system from which it cannot gracefully recover. There are many many small errors or unexpected hiccups that may occur within an individual program or part of the operating system that are handled either by the application itself or the operating system that it is running on that system. Usually when this happens, you will either see an error message, or see the program crash without causing the device to go into a complete panic.
[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTQJdGp4F34) provides a good analogy and demonstrates both an unhandled and a handled exception.
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