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I agree the whole rant about exceptions just seems wrong -- if you've got a state that you can handle right there in the function itself then it's not an exception. You just deal with it. The C code and the C++ code would be equivalent.

This feels more like a "Oh I have exceptions, I better use them" situation. And his solution is to pick a language without exceptions so he doesn't have to use them. It's all very odd.

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Or in Common Lisp you would be able to "signal" a condition and then handle the situation. Signal will just do nothing unless some higher level code has an explicit handler for it [1].

[1] I remember reading a MIME encoding library years ago. There was a point where the code would detect an error but if the error was at the end it would just drop that part and write in the last couple of bytes. In this situation, most clients won't care that this is happening but what about those that do? Since this code signalled error by returning NULL there was no way to signal "saw an error, but fixed it". In Common Lisp, signal could have been used for clients that would want to report on this.

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