I consider defer to be part of handling exceptions, but I can see how we differ here.

We're seriously drifting off track here, but if we should rely on Go to check array indexes, that seems like you _would_ want a recover block, so that we can map it to a Go-preferred error code?

Go doesn't have exceptions. Can you please stop saying it does? There's a reason we didn't give "panic" the name "throw". Because they work differently and are used for different things.

There's also no such thing as a "recover block" (you're thinking of a "finally block" or "catch block", neither of which exist in Go).

If we thought you should use recover any time there might be an array out of bounds panic, we'd have designed the whole language differently. Panics should happen when things go badly wrong, and most of the time that means your program should crash.

You should use recover only in two rare cases: 1. where you're specifically using panic/recover as a kind of setjmp/longjmp (as it is used within encoding/json, for example), and 2. where you don't want a programming error to bring down your entire program, such as in the base net/http handler (although I think it's debatable whether we should have done it there; but it's done now and we can't change it).

It amazes me that there has been so much discussion over this incredibly minor and seldom-used feature. Just return and check errors (and just panic when things go really wrong) and get on with your life.