Where are catch and throw useful in Ruby?

Question

I really don\'t see a sane use for these. There is already rescue and raise, so why the need for throw and catch? It seem

Answer 1

Note: It looks like a few things have changed with catch/throw in 1.9. This answer applies to Ruby 1.9.

A big difference is that you can throw anything, not just things that are derived from StandardError, unlike raise. Something silly like this is legal, for example:

throw Customer.new

but it's not terribly meaningful. But you can't do:

irb(main):003:0> raise Customer.new
TypeError: exception class/object expected
    from (irb):3:in `raise'
    from (irb):3
    from /usr/local/bin/irb:12:in `
'