Generally, I view it as a masochistic feature of the language, try not to use it unless you really need to (there is almost always a way to get around it). Most applications I have seen that really require eval fall under the heading of Stupid Perl Tricks.

There's no other way to do error trapping in perl. If you want to intercept a "die/croak" in someone else's code and handle it yourself, you need to use eval.

Myself, I like to do things like:

use Test::More;
SKIP: {
  eval { require DBD::SQLite };
  skip "DBD::SQLite not installed", 3 if $@; # 3 is "how many to skip"
   # ... tests using SQLite
}
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