What's broken about exceptions in Perl?

Question

A discussion in another question got me wondering: what do other programming languages\' exception systems have that Perl\'s lacks?

Perl\'s built-in exceptions are a

Answer 1

A problem I recently encountered with the eval exception mechanism has to do with the $SIG{__DIE__} handler. I had -- wrongly -- assumed that this handler only gets called when the Perl interpreter is exited through die() and wanted to use this handler for logging fatal events. It then turned out that I was logging exceptions in library code as fatal errors which clearly was wrong.

The solution was to check for the state of the $^S or $EXCEPTIONS_BEING_CAUGHT variable:

use English;
$SIG{__DIE__} = sub {
    if (!$EXCEPTION_BEING_CAUGHT) {
        # fatal logging code here
    }
};

The problem I see here is that the __DIE__ handler is used in two similar but different situations. That $^S variable very much looks like a late add-on to me. I don't know if this is really the case, though.