Kibitzing without example code is a dangerous endeavor, but...what the heck.

If you don't know if it's a sub, how do you know it takes arguments? This seems exactly why the method syntax is useful.

More convoluted - arrange to pass arguments to everything. Have some wrapper or go-between sub check that the target is a sub or not, and invoke it with arguments if it is.

Last time I checked, ref indicates this for you:

my $x = sub {print "Hello\n"}
print ref($x), "\n";
__OUTPUT__
CODE
[download]

I could be off on a wild goose chase here, but it seems you've decided on the solution (tie) independent of your problem space. The suggestion in the other thread about method syntax still seems square on target.