Then i guess that searching down into a recursive structure and just raising an "i found it" result object up doesn't count as a use case in your book, right?
You can always wrap the object you want to return in a suitable subclass of Exception. I would prefer to write it that way anyway, otherwise I'd need some sort of "catch anything which *isn't* a subclass of Exception" statement, which is rather awkward to spell. If this is considered a common enough requirement, a special built-in Exception subclass could even be provided for it, to save people the bother of defining their own... Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+