 <p>Note, it's not just silly or visually nice. It helps for example to exit a program without activating the end handlers which might mess up when doing multi threading or forked programs. Like in perl:</p> <pre><code>#!/usr/bin/env perl exec "/bin/true"; END { print "This wont get printed .. would have if I just 'exit' or 'die'\n"; } </code></pre>