I generally find that one should avoid using exceptions for flow control. They have their usages, but they should in my opinion only be used when they really sh

I generally find that one should avoid using exceptions for flow control. They have their usages, but they should in my opinion only be used when they really shine - when you have multiple levels of callers between the detection of the error and the handling. This was not the case in the simple example, and so I chose a return value instead of an exception.