[peterfirefly]

C++ exceptions came from ML.

The original purpose in ML was definitely control flow. Or rather, controllable heuristic search in the context of a proof assistant. A heuristic could "give up" by raising an exception and a meta heuristic would then try something else or give up.

They worked well because memory handling is clean and automatic in ML and because proof assistants mainly work in their own little world with little to no I/O (apart from logging to a file/stdout/stderr).