Without directly referencing your enumeration, these are the things you should consider: 1. You can't avoid exceptions completely as some DLLs may throw them, so you at least need to be able to catch them 2. Exceptions provide a built-in mechanism to pass messages and an error identifier, and you can easily extend exception objects to hold additional data. 3. Exceptions will pass control to the level of the next higher try block in the call stack, without having to forward a return values up through several function calls. 4. You can't 'forget' to check for an exception like you can forget to check an error return: provided you catch all exceptions in your main function, you can at the very least issue a meaningful error message before having to exit the program. In fact, exceptions are the only way to 100% prevent a 'silent death' of your application, and will prevent most cases of 'hanging' (except for those caused by infinite loops, and then only those cases where you didn't think to check on preconditions and throw an exception if not met...) Note that the last point (being almost always able to catch an error before the app breaks down) may also allow you to recover sufficient status information for saving the game and resuming at that point! I would say that is a pretty strong point from the PoV of the gamer.
