In particular idiom does not mean something deliberately entered into the language to solve a particular problem—that's just regular semantics. Idioms are by na

In particular idiom does not mean something deliberately entered into the language to solve a particular problem—that's just regular semantics. Idioms are by nature emergent. For example I might be conscious of 3 idioms among all the languages I know (which is much more than 3), yet I write idiomatic code because I know the languages well. In fact, outside of Go circles no one talks of idioms, they talk of idiomatic code. Who cares about compiler transformations? The issue is the semantic difference between return codes and exceptions. Nobody is asking for exceptions because they can't or don't know how to get to the correct scope to handle their errors, they're asking for them because they don't want to write all the boilerplate necessary to do so. And yes, you can transform exceptions to chained returns. That would be a lot of work for terrible performance. You can't do the other transformation though. It would require being able to statically analyze the code path to determine where the errors are eventually handled, which is impossible in the general case.