Do you consider this technique “BAD”?

Question

Sometimes you need to skip execution of part of a method under certain non-critical error conditions. You can use exceptions for that, but exceptions generally are not

Answer 1

To me what you are doing is bad in so many ways. The loop can be replaced by putting that code in a method.

I personally believe that if you have to put a ! in front of your conditions then you are looking for the wrong thing. For readability make your boolean match what you are checking for. You are really checking if there is an error or some bad condition, so I would prefer:

If (isError)
{
   //Do whatever you need to do for the error and
   return;
}

over

If (!isGood)
{
  //Do something
}

So check for what you really want to check for and keep the exception checks to a minimum. Your goal should be readibility over being tricky. Think of the poor soul that is going to have to come along and maintain your code.

One of the first things I worked on 28 years ago was a Fortran program that always needed to check if there was a graphics device available. Someone made the grand decision to call the boolean for this LNOGRAF, so if there was a graphics device available this would be false. I believe it got set this way because of a false efficiency, the check for the device returned zero if there was a graphics device. Throughout the code all the checks were to see if the graphics device was available. It was full of:

If (.NOT. LNOGRAF)

I don't think there was a single:

If (LNOGRAF)

in the program. This was used in mission planning software for B-52's and cruise missiles. It definitely taught me to name my variables for what I'm really checking for.