tye,
So this is a bug/feature, I see it in your reply below.
I thought:

Because a BEGIN block executes immediately,...

Meant that it executed and then execeptions were thrown. After running it through perl -MO=Deparse, I thought it was expected behavior since it doesn't seem to matter what kind of loop it is - the error isn't thrown until after it is completed.

Cheers - L~R

Update: Changed bug/feature to statement rather than question after seeing tye's reply further down in thread