The misunderstanding

# my test code
  catch    { print "unphooey again\n"; } ;
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Sorry, this doesn't make sense! Your completely misunderstanding the aim of catch(), it's basically syntactic sugar, the logic is in try().

You can also write

try {... some code to try ... } sub { ... some code to catch }
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sub try (&@) {
    my($try,$catch) = @_;
    eval { &$try };
    if ($@) {
       local $_ = $@;
       &$catch;
    }
}
sub catch (&) { $_[0] }
   
try {
    die "phooey";
} sub {
    /phooey/ and print "unphooey\n";
};
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UPDATE: the use of sub instead of catch is even better, since it allows a a prototype sub try (&&) which catches syntax errors at compile-time. (ATM the second argument to try() isn't necessarily a coderef!)

Some background

An & requires an anonymous subroutine, which, if passed as the first argument, does not require the sub keyword or a subsequent comma.

so passing a code reference as a second argument requires an explicit "sub" or just something mimicking a sub like this "catch()" function.

Bad perldoc

sub try (&$) would be much better for avoiding false uses and for better intrinsic documentation.

sub try (&$) {
    my($try,$catch) = @_;
    eval { &$try };
    if ($@) {
       local $_ = $@;
       &$catch;
    }
}
sub catch (&) { $_[0] }
   
try {
    die "phooey";
} catch {
    /phooey/ and print "unphooey\n";
};
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Where can I report improvements to perldoc?