How do you explicitly throw an error?

Question

There are several wordings for this depending on what programming languages you are used to, but none of them turned up results for me. Also, neither help abort() nor help raise() nor help throw() gave me anything.

How would you explicitly throw an error? How would you explicitly raise an error? How would you explicitly abort?

I have in the past just written my errormessage directly, which is of course invalid code and raises an error, but I'd prefer to be clear about what I'm doing here.

function may_fail() abort
  let l:message = system('something')
  if v:shell_error
    there was a problem with something <- can I use an actual abort() or something here?
  endif
endfunction

Answer 1

Ok, I found the answer a little later on StackOverflow. It's not clear to me whether these vimscript questions should be on vi.stackexchange or on SO.

Use echoerr to output an error and continue, and throw to abort / raise an error:

echoerr 'some command failed with: '
throw l:output