Thank you for the code snippet.  That is the solution that I settled upon but, yes, I wanted something like what you described as being present only in Lua torch.
My use case is that I added an optimizer that wants all the parameters in vector form (ported from Matlab).  Just wanted to avoid the copies.
What I have works for now.  Maybe, between projects, I’ll hit you guys with a pull request with an attempt to re-add this functionality.