Discussion on Exception Handling

What does /prog/ think of exception handling, as opposed to other methods such as return values or a global error variable/object? Personally, I think that exceptions in languages like C++ and Java have really introduced a much better method of handling errors that is language-independent. It makes your code infinitely more concise and readable, and now your errors actually have meaning beyond 0, "", null, etc.

I'm in my first year of computer programming at a local university, and we're just learning about exceptions now. It was like the world opened up; I couldn't believe how I could have accomplished anything before this, not knowing about exception handling. Never again will I have to use archaic methods of error handling.

>>19

This would be a bit easier in java due to anonymous classes. It could start looking more like the try catch syntax by embedding the definition of the error handler into the function that would normally contain the try cache block.