Inspired by Lisp's condition system I wrote a ruby library which comes pretty close to Lisp's error handling. It also implements "restarts" ... a little bit messy though since, as you said, low-level execption are used to get it working. In one point the condition system bootstraps itself which is quite interesting to think about.

https://github.com/melkon/conditions

An example ("parse_log_file" and "log_analyzer show restarts"): https://github.com/melkon/conditions/blob/master/example/exa...

In the beginning I thought it can only be ported to Ruby because I used some Ruby-specific features. The exception solution (which I implemented later) should work in a lot of different languages though.

Another thing is, if you understood the condition system, you can use it for a lot of different things besides error handling. You can build protocols on top of that, event handling etc. Freedom is yours.