Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006 (2007) [pdf]

"Exceptions are typically — and correctly — seen as a control structure". So much for those who say using exceptions for flow control is bad.

If they're important enough to be part of the language, somebody's going to use them... and common library functions will too. Exceptions aren't usually something you can boycott in a language ... and if you're going to have to use them, well, it's best to treat them as part of your program's logic, yes? Consider the many different errors Google handles and it's not always a dead failure... https://github.com/google/lmctfy/blob/master/util/task/codes... it's nice to be able to both return a value and an unambiguous exception state with automatic closure of resources (e.g. finally, or rewinding the stack...) such that you can safely retry without cleaning up after yourself. That's the goal here. Of course, Google's Go language avoids exceptions by using multiple return values, conventions and a defer statement... but then you can't easily put all your error handling code in any one place, can you, without restructuring your code? To each language its conventions, I suppose.

This is a great paper! It was given at HOPL 3 (History of Programming Languages, a conference which runs every 15 years). I'd recommend all of the HOPL 3 papers to aspiring language nerds, but especially the ones on C++, Lua, Haskell and Self.

Yeah, for a somewhat longer paper, it's eminently readable. Very human in tone.