You don't need to declare my $this = shift, Class::HPLOO will handle it automatically for you. About $this->{x}, yes, you still need to use it and any filter that tries to handles scope variables and global variables as an object attribute wont work very well!

But note that OO is much more than just a syntax, and Perl is one language that let us to know exactly how OO is build, what let us to build it like we want.