Re: Re: Out Of Memory error at 950MB with 14GB free RAM

My God!
Please, Abigail, could you explain why this expression is a problem?

$a [[1]] = 1;
[download]

take close to 50 MB on my system.
Many thanks.

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Re: Out Of Memory error at 950MB with 14GB free RAM by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Feb 10, 2004 at 13:53 UTC
`[1]` is a reference. A reference in a numeric context gives you a memory address. Memory addresses are usually big. Storing an element out of range in an array will make Perl grow the array so it fits - creating undefined values to fill up the array. Storing an element using a big index will make Perl create a huge array, with all the elements taking two handfuls of bytes. I'd say you're lucky it takes only 50Mb on your system. It dies on one system I tried it on, and it used 420 Mb on another. Abigail	[reply] [d/l]
Re: (3) Out Of Memory error at 950MB with 14GB free RAM by ambrus (Abbot) on Feb 10, 2004 at 14:01 UTC
Try `perl -wle 'print 0+[1]';` it will print a very big number, as it converts the pointer to an anonymous list (`[1]`) to an integer. Thus, `$a[[1]]=1` creates a very large array, as it has to set the `(0+[1])`-th element of @a to 1. Update: Abigail-II was somewhat faster to submit an answer, and his is actually cleaner than mine.	[reply] [d/l] [select]