Object-oriented Perl is a small amount of additional syntax and semantics, added to the existing imperative features of the Perl programming language. Those extras allow regular Perl packages, variables, and subroutines to behave like classes, objects, and methods.
It’s also a small number of special variables, packages and modules, and a large number of new techniques, that together provide inheritance, data encapsulation, operator overloading, automated definition of commonly used methods, generic programming, multiply-dispatched polymorphism, and persistence.