[alexknvl]

Let me use my favourite tool of intellectual terrorism: Just use monads. Ouch, now we have two problems here. :P

[vog]

To be serious: This was my first thought, too. Exceptions are essentially one kind of monads, and any complex compiler or interpreter could make good use of more types of monads.

I believe the paper of Wadler makes this most clear. Some time ago, it was a real eye-opener for me:

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/essence/essence....