The magic of tie seems to be strong. Even when using a reference to an element of a tied array one cannot bypass the associated class. And the access through the reference provides the correct index. So is this what happens when Perl aliases elements in a loop?

use strict;
use warnings;

package MyClass;
    use Tie::Array;
    our @ISA = ('Tie::Array');
        our @data;
    # mandatory methods
    sub TIEARRAY { my $class = shift; bless \@data, $class; @data = @_
+; return \@data }
    sub FETCH { my ($self, $index ) = @_; print "FETCH($index)\n"; ret
+urn $data[$index] }
    sub STORE { my ($self, $index, $value) = @_; print "STORE($index)\
+n"; $data[$index] = $value }
    sub FETCHSIZE { print "<FETCHSIZE> "; return scalar @data }

package main;

my @x;

tie @x, "MyClass", 0, 0, 0;
my $x = \$x[2];

$$x++;
print "@x\n";
[download]