Exceptions for flow of control

Question

There is an interesting post over here about this, in relation to cross-application flow of control.

Well, recently, I've come across an interesting problem. Generating the nth value in a potentially (practically) endless recursive sequence. This particular algorithm WILL be in atleast 10-15 stack references deep at the point that it succeeds. My first thought was to throw a SuccessException that looked something like this (C#):

class SuccessException : Exception
{
    public string Value
    { get; set; }

    public SuccessException(string value)
        : base()
    {
        Value = value;
    }
}

Then do something like this:

try
{
    Walk_r(tree);
}
catch (SuccessException ex)
{
    result = ex.Value;
}

Then my thoughts wandered back here, where I've heard over and over to never use Exceptions for flow control. Is there ever an excuse? And how would you structure something like this, if you were to implement it?

Answer 1

In this case I would be looking at your Walk_r method, you should have something that returns a value, throwing an exception to indicate success, is NOT a common practice, and at minimum is going to be VERY confusing to anyone that sees the code. Not to mention the overhead associated with exceptions.

Answer 2

It's not a very good idea to throw exceptions as a part of an algorithm, especially in .net. In some languages/platforms, exceptions are pretty efficient when thrown, and they usually are, when an iterable gets exhausted for instance.

Answer 3

Why not just return the resulting value? If it returns anything at all, assume it is successful. If it fails to return a value, then it means the loop failed.

If you must bring back from a failure, then I'd recommend you throw an exception.

Answer 4

The issue with using exceptions is that tey (in the grand scheme of things) are very inefficient and slow. It would surely be as easy to have a if condition within the recursive function to just return as and when needed. To be honest, with the amount of memory on modern PC's its unlikely (not impossible though) that you'll get a stack overflow with only a small number of recursive calls (<100).

If the stack is a real issue, then it might become necessary to be 'creative' and implement a 'depth limited search strategy', allow the function to return from the recursion and restart the search from the last (deepest) node.

To sum up: Exceptions should only be used in exceptional circumstances, the success of a function call i don't believe qualifies as such.

Answer 5

Using exceptions in normal program flow in my book is one of the worst practises ever. Consider the poor sap who is hunting for swallowed exceptions and is running a debugger set to stop whenever an exception happens. That dude is now getting mad.... and he has an axe. :P

Answer 6

walk_r should simply return the value when it is hit. It's is a pretty standard recursion example. The only potential problem I see is that you said it is potentially endless, which will have to be compensated for in the walk_r code by keeping count of the recursion depth and stopping at some maximum value.

The exception actually makes the coding very strange since the method call now throws an exception to return the value, instead of simply returning 'normally'.

try
{
    Walk_r(tree);
}
catch (SuccessException ex)
{
    result = ex.Value;
}

becomes

result = Walk_r(tree);

Answer 7

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say stick with the exception to indicate success. It might be expensive to throw/catch but that may be insignificant compared with the cost of the search itself and possibly less confusing than an early exit from the method.