I wish I could remember where I thought I read that Larry said it, but combining the run-time compilation operator and the exception-handling operator seems to confuse people.

It makes a certain amount of sense to me, as you don't want a typo in STRING to kill your whole program (and wrapping things in Java-esque try {} - catch {} is a quick way to early RSI or no more error handling), and the idea of context and different operator behavior based on argument list makes sense....

I think people tend to think of eval as always slow, not going far enough to realize that it's only slow when it compiles something.