With respect to scalar (string) length, the only limitation you're likely to run into is your system's memory. Same for hash and array sizes:
Perl stores strings as sequences of bytes, with no arbitrary constraints on length or content
Programming Perl, p. 38
Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor
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Assuming you have the virtual memory available, you might run into problems near 2^31 bytes. One of my more perverse scripts regularly has a 125Mb string. No problems other then swapping.
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Reminds me of the standard recipe for a memory
subsystem excerciser in perl.
Basically only tests ulimit, and the efficiency
of your operating system's out of memory performance.
and as all these things are, use with extreme
caution on systems that you don't admin.
I've used it to clean ram up so that performance tests that need a cold buffer cache have some free ram to work with.
perl -e ' while (1) { $x .= " " x 1024 };'
--
Jay "Yohimbe" Thorne, alpha geek for UserFriendly | [reply]
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If you're talking about numeric data, there are system dictated limits for the size of numbers you can use in calculations. If you want to deal with huge numbers, look into the Math::BigInt and Math::BigFloat modules. I think they are part of the standard distribution.
When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct? --Larry Wall | [reply]
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