Yes, this is indeed no violation of Demeter's Law. I was arguing that navigating node hierarchies is better left to a language tailored to the problem domain. So we have three conceivable cases where such method call chains appear: one is a design problem, one is better addressed on a different level, and the other (ie returning $self from a mutator - which is really a Perl-only idiom) is not really an issue WRT this discussion.