Unfortunately, many do. When that includes popular libraries and frameworks, "abuse" becomes idiomatic or even strictly necessary. When it's in the language itself, such as Python's use of KeyError or StopIteration, that's even more true. Since better alternatives exist for most exception use cases, I'm of the opinion that direct language support was a bad idea. A more general and explicit cousin of signal handlers would suffice for those few "stop the world" cases, and can be done via library functions. Optional types, multiple return values, or plain old error codes (I like Zig's "non-ignorable error code" approach) suffice for the rest.