Exceptions in ML languages are very similar to those in Java. The reason for that is simple: they are simply a good way of dealing with computations that might

Exceptions in ML languages are very similar to those in Java. The reason for that is simple: they are simply a good way of dealing with computations that might fail. Having said that, exceptions are best used (in any language) where you want to deal with the failure way up in the call stack. If you catch the exception right where it occurs, you should just use a safe method that reports a failure in the return value. Speaking as a Haskell programmer, never use exceptions. You can get away with this advice because the Either monad allows you to have the behavior of exceptions (namely, at any point you can "fail" a computation and have the error automatically propagate up to the handler). However, this approach relies heavily on having a type system more advanced than OCaml's in order to be reasonable.