Cristoforo (++) is right.

A few more pieces of advice:

• use strict;. If you did, it would have told you that "$count" was not valid.
• Do not pre-pend your called subroutine names with &. There is old fashioned, and there are a few esoteric reasons for using it (Beyond the scope of this note).
• Your "$max_bits" can be initialized to zero - that is probably more understable to the lay reader than having to explain why you start at 60.