using exceptions as a "deep" return

[Pete Becker]

When I indeed read whatever you two wrote in C++CS, I swooned with relief
that someone had so forcibly decried the VB6 technique of testing a
container for membership by dropping a key in and catching an error
exception.

Java containers do this sort of thing, too. Writing a function that
calls various container members, some of which return error codes and
some of which throw exceptions, is a nightmare.