Ok, but it's still more work than if throwing an exception were simply the default. And this is just one example. I programmed perl for the better part of a d

Ok, but it's still more work than if throwing an exception were simply the default. And this is just one example. I programmed perl for the better part of a decade and every day I felt the pain of how "anti-Huffman encoded" it is unless you're making 3 line scripts. If perl people wish to concede that this is all perl is good for then I'll happily concede that perl does indeed have good Huffman encoding. :)