In the latest post to his site Stefan Koopmanschap offers some advice on when to use exceptions and when to avoid them (the result of a recent Twitter discussion).

I recently found myself in a discussion on whether or not exceptions could be used to control program flow in software (specifically in PHP applications). That triggered me to post a tweet:

Exceptions should not be used to control expected application flow. Discuss.... @skoop

This triggered quite a bit of discussion, which gave me a lot of input on this topic. I want to thank everyone who joined that discussion for their input, which was really valuable. In this blogpost I'll do a summary of the different arguments in the discussion, and give my opinion on this.

He goes on to define the term "program flow" and how that relates to the idea of using exceptions to control it. He then talks about naming things, the "intent" of your code and how the right names can make your code clearer and easier to maintain.