It depends on your definition of objects whether you call something an object due to the syntactic sugar of how to place a method call. Personally, I don't care about the syntactic sugar of whether the method call goes before the object or after.

For me, objects are instances of classes. A %hash isn't an instance of a class. I can't subclass it. There's no "HASH" class to play around with.

Now, granted, OO is more a state of mind than syntax. But when acting on data, some object must be present somewhere. And one must stretch the definition of OO to utter uselessness to consider

my $bitstr = BitStream::get_bits(128);
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to be anywhere near OO. There's no object in sight here, no matter how hard you look. Let alone there's any of Perl's OO machinery getting involved here (there won't be a lookup for a 'get_bits' method in @BitStream::ISA classes, if 'get_bits' wouldn't be defined in the BitStream package for instance).

Abigail