As a side note, the author talks about exceptions as though they are a Good Thing (TM). I'm not sure if other languages have somehow fixed the issues with them, but I tend to agree with Raymond Chen's analysis here - exceptions are too difficult to handle or recognize when poorly handled: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36693/

Agreed, exceptions seem wonky to me as well but I'm not sure what'd be better

My current preference is to treat errors as just other valid return values/states to be dealt with (assuming they're recoverable)... There may well be better ways. The erlang model of restarting services [terminology?] sounds promising for a large number of scenarios, and the `nursery`/`bundle` approach linked in my previous OP would seem to allow this in even low-level languages... something to experiment with! 🙂

Exceptions as such conflate error handling with jumping up the stack. Lisp's condition system is the closest sane alternative I've used http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html.

Thanks for that @wtaysom. I'm not fluent in LISP, so there was a bit of a language barrier! I've internally translated into C to try to evaluate it. I'm not sure this is quite right, so please correct me where I'm wrong... It seems like an expansion of the fairly common pattern of proving a function pointer to handle errors: Instead of a single handler, you provide/build a list/stack of error 'restarts' and another 'handler' that chooses the appropriate restart to use. This certainly seems like it could a useful technique. It's hard to see a priori where the benefits/drawbacks would be. I'll have to try it out and see!