I think the misunderstanding is:
$! is not a general purpose error message, it is a magical wrapper
around errno() (read the section in perlvar)
You *COULD* set $! to some numeric value selected from errno.h if there was one close enough to your message. But a user of your library getting "Divide by zero error" because that was the closest thing you could find for "Didn't give me the wumble structure I wanted" is going to be sorely confused.
Maybe you should be looking at croak and friends, or even taking the bigger step and start throwing exceptions.
Excellent info thanks :)
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