Fair point :-)

What I was trying to say (badly) was that I didn't see how tie and UNIVERSAL would fit together.

1. Not all objects are tied objects and need to support the tie methods - so it doesn't make sense for them to be UNIVERSAL
2. Tied scalars, arrays, etc. are different and support different methods - so having them all inherit from the same class doesn't make a lot of sense either

I guess you could argue for a virtual class Tied, with subclasses of Tied::Scalar, Tied::Hash, etc. but it's probably not worth the effort, and would annoy the people who don't think of tie in an OO way.