It should ultimately be a matter of readability. If it's more readable for you to use Exceptions, by all means use them. But if you're working in a domain where

It should ultimately be a matter of readability. If it's more readable for you to use Exceptions, by all means use them. But if you're working in a domain where you have control over the type of the return, then choose a range of return values which contains a representation of all possible results of your function and not just the "everything is working" result to be explicit. You don't have to return only primitive types. You can return data structures too, so you can encode the error as part of a return type and treat it and the rest of the data on the same level. In short, it's a little simplistic to go void->integer or void->boolean. You should really be going void->struct or void->class. That gives you wide latitude in defining the range of your output types.