Why don't I need a & to call a function?

[Siegfried Heintze]

I've been studying this sample code that someone gave to me in response to
one of my earlier queries. Why is it not necessary to put a "&" in front of
DBH in the statement DBH->prepare?

Thanks,
Siegfried

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI ;
use Data::Dumper; 

our $dbh; 

sub DBH{
    unless ( $dbh && $dbh->ping ) {
          $dbh = DBI->connect ( 'dbi:mysql:dbname=hotjobs', 'root', 'secret'
) ;
          die DBI->errstr unless $dbh && $dbh->ping; 
    }
    return $dbh;
}

  my $sth = DBH->prepare ( qq { SELECT * FROM jobtitle WHERE sJobTitle =
'$sJobTitle' } );


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