Exception-based Switch-Case and the flavour of Python

There's been a lot of discussion around switch-case flow-control in Python lately. With this recipe, Zoran Isailovski weighs in with what I find is a nice, clean, pythonic way of handling switch statements. He references another recipe by Brian Beck that handles the switch with a for loop (very cool).

I notice a comment on Zoran's recipe that references the C2 wiki's page on not using exceptions for flow control. Now I spend most of my time switching between Java and Python and it's true that I would never dream of using exceptions to control the flow in my Java application, but it's different in Python. In standard Python, iterators raise an exception to stop iteration and this is a pattern that is fairly well-recognized in the community.

All of which just points to the differences in flavour between Python and Java.