This doesn't apply to perl's OO-ish handling, but when I was programming in Java, I found that the nature of Java's forced exception handling made me think of the possible failure states of my code while writing and testing it, as opposed to an afterthought that came about in later stages of development. IMO, I'd rather do error testing with exceptions rather than eval-die, particularly if you have a potentally deep exception model.

(For those not familar with Java's exception handling, if your function or method calls any other function or method that is declared to return an exception, you must either catch that exception in your function, or declare your function one that can throw that type of exception. Exceptions were objects, so that allowed generic ("RuntimeException") as well as specific ("PermissionDeniesException") exceptions to be issued. Note that this differs from C++ as functions neither are declared to throw exceptions, and you don't have to deal with exceptions; you can let fail up through the call stack).

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important