It seems so, but the catch being restricted to the else block of this exact if block means it's considerably less expensive than a regular exception. additional

It seems so, but the catch being restricted to the else block of this exact if block means it's considerably less expensive than a regular exception. additionally, most of the time when doing operations covered by this, you wouldn't really care about the type of your supposed exception (ie why bother throwing a endoffileexception when you know you're going to catch it right there), so for this use case specifically this gives you a free pass to say "go to error handling, i don't care about naming things because this is all extremely local"