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This is really interesting. For systems programming, files usually have clear ownership and modification context. If I call exists(), it should still exists for as long as that thread is paused.

It's an anti-pattern to throw errors for expected behavior.

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Which is why you don't throw errors but return a result type such as Rust's Result, Haskell's Either, or C++'s upcoming std::expected :)

On the other hand, non-atomically asking for permission first in any concurrent (or re-entrant!) context is not just an antipattern but simply wrong and always a possible race condition. It is impossible to write a routine that tries to open a file and is statically guaranteed to succeed.

The idea appears to me to have been popularized by python, where it's straight called an antipattern to do the check beforehand [0]. The language also uses exceptions for standard control flow - for example, there's one called StopIteration that the language uses to indicate to loops that the current generator or iterator has reached its end.

[0] https://docs.quantifiedcode.com/python-anti-patterns/readabi...

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