So that's the behavior I'm trying to understand about die. If it is going to cause the program to bomb, then it seems like (especially for CGI) a much better idea to me (both in terms of user-friendly solutions and in terms of code re-usability) to build the function in such a way that it returns a false value if it fails. That way the function doesn't kill the whole process (i.e. HTTP result code 500) and it can be used in statements like

$foo = biff($bap) || 'Bar'; 

or

if ($dbh = handle($db)) {
    do_something($dbh);
} else {
    dont();
}
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(for instance).