Perhaps you have a distorted view of exceptions. I consider the "catch with eval {}" errors thrown by DBI to be a decent design, for example.

Use exceptions when an error return value from the method call would be either inconvenient or impossible to check for.

For a constructor, typically an undef value is returned for an exceptional case. For setters or getters, throwing exceptions seem to make more sense.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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