That's not right. eval BLOCK has no overhead (or rather negligible overhead).

eval EXPR (string eval) *does* have overhead, because the string needs to be compiled at runtime, but that's the issue here.

In general, actually, I would tend to agree with you, but for a different reason: there is no sense in wrapping *every* function call in its own eval. Instead wrap an entire self-contained block in an eval, like this:

    eval {
        ...
        ...
        ...
    };
    if ($@) {
        ## Got error
    }
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You will jump out of the block as soon as your code hits an exception, and you might as well keep your exception-handling in one place, rather than scattered all over the place.

To the OP: check out Exception::Class and Error, among others.