Fair point. What I was attempting to convey is that the reason I think the CL condition system works so well is that at its core it doesn't attempt to manage c

Fair point. What I was attempting to convey is that the reason I think the CL condition system works so well is that at its core it doesn't attempt to manage control flow directly; i.e. neither HANDLER-BIND nor RESTART-BIND unwind the stack on their own, and even ERROR only gets its behavior by falling back to INVOKE-DEBUGGER if unhandled. Because CL has good tools for doing non-local control flow that aren't bound up in its condition/exception system it winds up strictly more expressive (IMHO) than languages that conflate these. What I've noticed from languages that have traditional try/catch exception handling (especially when that's the only non-local control flow available) is that the mechanism of error handling is seen as DEEP MAGIC by their users. If you separate it out into non-local control flow and a protocol for communicating exception handlers as CL does, the "magical" properties go away since it can be seen how the condition system could be implemented. Or at least that's how it worked for me.