It gives you control over the output of your program (and as you mention, the exact error code - which probably should be 1 in this instance). It's often more

It gives you control over the output of your program (and as you mention, the exact error code - which probably should be 1 in this instance). It's often more user friendly to print a short human-readable message (or nothing) than to dump a huge stack trace. YMMV, if this is an internal dev tool then the opposite might be true!