I understand that \"Exceptions are for exceptional cases\" [a], but besides just being repeated over and over again, I\'ve never found an actual reason for this fact.
<
I agree with Mitch that that "Exceptions should not be used for normal control flow". I just want to add that from what I remember from my computer science classes, catching exceptions is expensive. I've never really tried to do benchmarks, but it would be interesting to compare performance between say, an if/else vs try/catch.