Yes, although standard Perl idioms can do that without a named sub (i.e., get just the unique hash key names). I could envision an OO object that returns just the keys of a hash via a method call that represents the "persistent data" related to that object. In a non-OO program, the normal thing would be to return a reference to the created hash (i.e. the values are significant and needed for further processing). I don't see any disagreement here.