Why do you want to make your code OO? Most programs in the world are not OO and do just fine. What benefit do you have to keeping information about the sentence in one place?

As for your problem, you want to use overload, specifically stringify (or '""') and cmp. That way, your objects behave as you'd expect them to when you do something if ( $records[10] eq $records[20] ) { print "Sentence is '$records[10]'\n" }