I know exactly what boundaries are lacking, that is what led to my original comment. And yes, functions can do whatever they want. Programmers expect special language features to be more useful than the alternatives though! If a function does call abort(), I can actually see the call, along with a stack trace; with source code I even know why the code exited. Odds are good that the abort() came from an assert() macro, giving me control over which builds can unexpectedly exit. Exceptions give me none of that, and introduce ways for valuable state to be totally lost in the process.