What exactly is "exit" in PowerShell?
Solution 1:
It's a reserved keyword (like return, filter, function, break).
Reference
Also, as per Section 7.6.4 of Bruce Payette's Powershell in Action:
But what happens when you want a script to exit from within a function defined in that script? ... To make this easier, Powershell has the exit keyword.
Of course, as other have pointed out, it's not hard to do what you want by wrapping exit in a function:
PS C:\> function ex{exit}
PS C:\> new-alias ^D ex