Exactly.  And as a consequence of this both Lisp and Smalltalk allow you to restart from exceptions.  Lisp has an extremely sophisticated method (most powerful of any language imo) called "restarts".  These make it a lot easier to build much more robust software than it is without them.  <a href="http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...</a>