While I could go into what makes an object oriented language object oriented, the most important distinction is that is the creation of data "objects." In this case, Perl is certainly not more object oriented than C++

Any HIGH LEVEL language hides the particular implementation of anything it does. Only writing in bytecodes or assembly hides nothing. I know that you don't consciously think of what register you are writing to when you make a variable in C.

What you are thinking of is how "high level" the language is. Which is to say, how abstracted from the hardware is it. Perhaps Perl is more high level, but again, I could argue that foundation classes and such make C/C++ just as high level as any visit to CPAN. Data hiding is only one aspect of an object oriented language. The reason PERL treats variables as it does is because of the nature of the interpretters that it is meant to replace.

Just Another Perl Backpacker