I'm afraid I still don't quite understand the relationship between \@arr in the constructor and the [] array ref in TIEARRAY. Would you mind rewriting this example in a way that demonstrates the "two-faced" aspect of what I'm trying to achieve? There is something like it in perltie, but it doesn't actually have an additional 'new' constructor to abstract away the tie'ing (and uses a hash) and I couldn't quite rework it in the way I intend.