Hi all, I'm looking for some module recommendations before I run off and reinvent a wheel. This is a two-part question; for the first part I haven't really found anything on CPAN, and for the second part I have a few ideas (below), but again, haven't really found anything. I suspect there might be some modules I'm missing.

So I have two-dimensional data represented as an AoA. In a configuration file, I need to specify ranges of that data, for example "extract rows X through Y and columns M through N". It would be nice if these ranges could be expressed in some easy way, like in the example I showed below, and I would like to get only a 2-dimensional subset of the larger data. The second part is, it would be really nice if the returned values were aliases/references to the original data, so that if I make a modification to the subset, it modifies the original, and vice versa (so basically, I want a "view" of the larger dataset). I know I could do this with Data::Alias or tied arrays, but again, maybe someone knows a module that already provides this. Here is the whole thing expressed in code:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Test::More tests=>2;

sub getsubset {
    ...
}

my $data = [
    ['a','b','c','d'],
    ['e','f','g','h'],
    ['i','j','k','l'],
    ['m','n','o','p'] ];

my $range = 'R2C2:R3C3';  # or any other useful syntax!
my $subset = getsubset($data, $range);

is_deeply $subset, [
    ['f','g'],
    ['j','k'] ];

# Part 2:
$subset->[0][1] = 'X';
$subset->[1][0] = 'Y';

is_deeply $data, [
    ['a','b','c','d'],
    ['e','f','X','h'],
    ['i','Y','k','l'],
    ['m','n','o','p'] ];
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