On an interesting additive side note, Perl also allows for the use of last-ditch memory should that last case ever happen. From the Camel's mouth: "However, if your perl was compiled to take advantage of $^M, you may use it as an emergency memory pool. If your Perl is compiled with -DPERL_EMERGENCY_SBRK and uses Perl's malloc then...", etc. It isn't used much, and probably shouldn't be (especially by a novice user)..but it's there.