[peoplewindow]

It's actually slower to not use exceptions and what you describe is not an advantage - exceptions also force you to deal with it or pass it along, if the exception is checked. Bounds check failures aren't of course because that would be incredibly inconvenient and unwieldy, and anyway, you'd just pass it all the way up the stack to some much higher level point which is the only place you can sanely do something (like not render the string at all).