Your code which wraps tie in @{ ... } does not work because all elements are FETCH-ed first before the loop block code is executed. I.e. in the above case, FETCH(0) and FETCH(1) are called before "first" and "second" are print-ed by print(). The @{ ... } basically turns the tied array into list of values. I need to iterate over the tied array so the code in the loop block (in this case, print()) is executed along with FETCH/FETCHSIZE.