This is how Catalyst's chained dispatch works (q.v. Catalyst::DispatchType::Chained). I always thought it was just sane.

As for assertions, I read a blog post recently where the author asserted that sane code generally had less else-clauses than otherwise. I've been looking at my code in that light and the code I find to be better has that property. I have a lot of unless-blocks of the form:

sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    my %args = @_;

    # Lots of these
    unless ( ... ) {
        return;
    }

    # Do the real thing
}
[download]

Same thing, right?