What is the best way to handle exceptions in Perl?

The consensus of the Perl community seems to be that Try::Tiny is the preferred way of doing exception handling. The "lenient policy" you refer to is probably due to a combination of:

• Perl not being a fully object-oriented language. (e.g. in contrast to Java where you can't avoid dealing with exceptions.)
• The background of many Perl developers. (Languages like C¹ and shell don't have exception mechanisms.)
• The kind of tasks people tend to use Perl for. (Small scripts for text munging and report generation where exception handling isn't needed.)
• Perl not having a (good) built-in exception mechanism.

Note that the last item means that you'll see a lot of code like this:

eval { something() };
if ($@) {
    warn "Oh no! [$@]\n";
}

That's exception handling even though it doesn't use try/catch syntax. It's fragile, though, and will break in a number of subtle edge cases that most people don't think about. Try::Tiny and the other exception handling modules on CPAN were written to make it easier to get right.

_{1. C does have setjmp() and longjmp(), which can be used for a very crude form of exception handling.}

Never test $@ as is, because it is a global variable, so even the test itself can change it.

General eval-template:

my $result;

eval {
    $result= something();
    # ...
    1;  # ok
} or do {
    my $eval_error= $@ || "error";
    # ...
    die $eval_error;
};  # needs a semicolon

In practice that is the lightest way. It still leaves a tiny room for funny $@ behaviour, but nothing that really concerned me enough.