language-agnostic - Is throwing and catching exceptions only an improvement of readability instead of using if statments on the return value?

Question

Is there any reason why it's better to use a try/catch statement when one can check to see if a value that is designated to indicate a problem is returned?

For example a function prime factors a number. If a negative integer is passed to it would it be "better" for an exception to be thrown or a particular value returned (that would never be a legitimate value, say -1).

If a function doesn't need to return something would it be less efficient to return true on success and false on failure, as opposed to throwing something?

Answer 1

Exceptions can propagate up across multiple call frames at a time without any extra code in the intervening call frames to check for error conditions/returns. This means they have the potential to yield better performance (at least in the non-error case) than code that's based on return value checks at every call level. That's probably the main concrete benefit.

Answer 2

The use of a Try/Catch versus returning a boolean value has been discussed for a while. I found this StackOverflow article that might add some insight. For myself I tend to use both the Try/Catch and the boolean return. It depends when a method is being called. As well, sometimes it is best to let an error bubble up the stack so it can be caught and dealth with effieciently.

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