Exception handling is one of Perl's exceptional (ha!) weak points. You might want to read about Object-Oriented Exception Handling. It's a nice article, though it has some bugs in the code.

If you're going to keep it simple and return false, don't return 0 or undef! Instead, use a bare return:

unless ( $password_validated ) {
  # return 0; # <-- Usually bad
  return;
}
else {
  # do what must be done
}
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The problem with using return 0; or return undef; is that someone using your code might be assigning the results to an array. If so, checking for "truth" in the array will give a false positive because the array will then have one element whose value is zero or undef. Evaluating the array in a boolean context then evaluates as true instead of the expected false.

Cheers,
Ovid

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Silence is Evil