“PasswordNotCorrectException”不是一个使用异常的好例子。用户输入错误的密码是意料之中的，所以在我看来，这几乎不是个例外。您甚至可能从中恢复，显示一个漂亮的错误消息，因此这只是一个有效性检查。

未处理的异常将最终停止执行——这是好事。如果返回false、null或错误代码，则必须自己处理程序的状态。如果您忘记检查某个地方的条件，您的程序可能会继续使用错误的数据运行，并且您可能很难弄清楚发生了什么以及在哪里发生了什么。

当然，空的catch语句也可能导致同样的问题，但至少发现这些语句更容易，而且不需要理解逻辑。

所以根据经验:

在您不想要或无法从错误中恢复的地方使用它们。

我对异常的使用有哲学问题。基本上，您期待一个特定的场景发生，但不是明确地处理它，而是将问题推到“其他地方”处理。至于“其他地方”在哪里，谁也说不准。

主要有两类异常:

1)系统异常(如数据库连接丢失)或 2)用户异常。(例如用户输入验证，“密码不正确”)

我发现创建自己的用户异常类很有帮助，当我想抛出一个用户错误时，我想要以不同的方式处理(即资源错误显示给用户)，然后我在我的主错误处理程序中所需要做的就是检查对象类型:

            If TypeName(ex) = "UserException" Then
               Display(ex.message)
            Else
               DisplayError("An unexpected error has occured, contact your help  desk")                   
               LogError(ex)
            End If

一个经验法则是在您通常无法预测的情况下使用异常。例如数据库连接、磁盘上丢失的文件等。对于您可以预测的场景，例如用户试图使用错误的密码登录，您应该使用返回布尔值的函数，并知道如何优雅地处理这种情况。您不希望仅仅因为有人输入了密码错误而抛出异常，从而突然结束执行。

最终，决定取决于是使用异常处理更有助于处理此类应用程序级错误，还是通过您自己的机制(如返回状态代码)更有帮助。我不认为哪个更好有一个严格的规则，但我会考虑:

Who's calling your code? Is this a public API of some sort or an internal library? What language are you using? If it's Java, for example, then throwing a (checked) exception puts an explicit burden on your caller to handle this error condition in some way, as opposed to a return status which could be ignored. That could be good or bad. How are other error conditions in the same application handled? Callers won't want to deal with a module that handles errors in an idiosyncratic way unlike anything else in the system. How many things can go wrong with the routine in question, and how would they be handled differently? Consider the difference between a series of catch blocks that handle different errors and a switch on an error code. Do you have structured information about the error you need to return? Throwing an exception gives you a better place to put this information than just returning a status.

To my mind, the fundamental question should be whether one would expect that the caller would want to continue normal program flow if a condition occurs. If you don't know, either have separate doSomething and trySomething methods, where the former returns an error and the latter does not, or have a routine that accepts a parameter to indicate whether an exception should be thrown if it fails). Consider a class to send commands to a remote system and report responses. Certain commands (e.g. restart) will cause the remote system to send a response but then be non-responsive for a certain length of time. It is thus useful to be able to send a "ping" command and find out whether the remote system responds in a reasonable length of time without having to throw an exception if it doesn't (the caller would probably expect that the first few "ping" attempts would fail, but one would eventually work). On the other hand, if one has a sequence of commands like:

  exchange_command("open tempfile");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("close tempfile");
  exchange_command("copy tempfile to realfile");

人们会希望任何操作的失败都能中止整个序列。虽然可以检查每个操作以确保操作成功，但如果命令失败，让exchange_command()例程抛出异常会更有帮助。

实际上，在上面的场景中，有一个参数来选择一些失败处理模式可能会有所帮助:从不抛出异常，仅为通信错误抛出异常，或者在命令没有返回“成功”指示的任何情况下抛出异常。