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。

我的小指南很大程度上受到了“代码完成”这本伟大的书的影响:

使用异常来通知不应该被忽略的事情。 如果错误可以在本地处理，就不要使用异常 确保异常与例程的其余部分处于相同的抽象级别。 异常应该留给真正的异常。

我个人的指导方针是:当发现当前代码块的基本假设为假时抛出异常。

例1:假设我有一个函数，它应该检查任意类，如果该类继承自List<>，则返回true。这个函数问一个问题:“这个对象是List的后代吗?”这个函数永远不会抛出异常，因为它的操作中没有灰色地带——每个单独的类要么继承了List<>，要么继承了List<>，所以答案总是“是”或“否”。

Example 2: say I have another function which examines a List<> and returns true if its length is more than 50, and false if the length is less. This function asks the question, "Does this list have more than 50 items?" But this question makes an assumption - it assumes that the object it is given is a list. If I hand it a NULL, then that assumption is false. In that case, if the function returns either true or false, then it is breaking its own rules. The function cannot return anything and claim that it answered the question correctly. So it doesn't return - it throws an exception.

这与“负载问题”逻辑谬误相当。每个函数都问一个问题。如果给出的输入使该问题成为谬误，则抛出异常。对于返回void的函数，这条线很难画出来，但底线是:如果函数对其输入的假设违反了，它应该抛出异常，而不是正常返回。

这个等式的另一方面是:如果你发现你的函数经常抛出异常，那么你可能需要改进它们的假设。

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.

避免抛出异常的主要原因是抛出异常涉及大量开销。

下面这篇文章指出的一件事是，例外是针对异常条件和错误的。

错误的用户名不一定是程序错误，而是用户错误……

下面是关于。net中的异常的一个不错的起点: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229030 (VS.80) . aspx

异常与返回错误代码参数应该是关于流控制的，而不是哲学(错误有多“异常”):

void f1() throws ExceptionType1, ExceptionType2 {}

void catchFunction() {
  try{
    while(someCondition){
      try{
        f1(); 
      }catch(ExceptionType2 e2){
        //do something, don't break the loop
      }
    }
  }catch(ExceptionType1 e1){
    //break the loop, do something else
  }

}