Tied/Magical Array/Hash Elements Do Not Autovivify For normal arrays $foo = \$bar[1] will assign undef to $bar[1] (assuming that it didn't exist before), but for tied/magical arrays and hashes such autovivification does not happen because there is currently no way to catch the reference creation. The same problem affects slicing over non-existent indices/keys of a tied/magical array/hash.