Except that this way is not really ideal IMO. I am a recent Perl Best Practices convert to the idea that you should die/croak on an error instead of returning undef. This means the caller has to explicitly catch the exception (with eval) or his application will die, which in turn means there'll be less cases of forgotten error checks. Using exceptions you can also pass a helpful error message up to the caller, or an exception object which contains useful data. Yes, you'll do a lot of eval'ing, which is ugly, but it's much more defensive programming.