No, none of this is "it hurts doctor" stuff. It's quite normal to have exception objects. It's normal for exception objects to have stringification. It's unusual but not not bad to have a destructor. It is bad to fail to protect your caller against $@ clobbering but mistakes can happen. It's pretty unusual to see your tests $SIG{__DIE__} get overridden and it's worth automating the instrumentation of that happening. Mostly, I really like Test::Exception because with perl, you must be paranoid and this lets me outsource my paranoia.