Should a constructor ever return undef?

[tall_man]

As a matter of object-oriented style, what do you think of a class constructor like this:

package MaybeADirectoryObject;
use strict;

sub new {
   my ($class, $dir) = @_;
   if(! -e $dir) {
      print "The directory $dir does not exist\n";
      return;
   }
   
   my $self = {};
   # Initialize $self using directory here...
   bless($self, $class);
   return $self;
}

Another programmer in my shop did something like this, and a third programmer was caught by it when they set the return value of new() into a variable and called a method on it much later in the code.

Since I started object-oriented programming with C++, I find it very strange to return an undef from a constructor. I could see calling die and letting the caller handle the exception with an eval block, but returning an undef seems wrong to me.

What do you think?