perl array size is smaller than it should be - arrays

Question

I want to initialize 4^9 (=262144) indices of #clump as 0. So I wrote this:
my $k=9;
my #clump=();
my $n=4**$k;
for(my $i=0;$i<$n;$i++){
push(#clump,0);
print "$i ";
}
But it keeps freezing at 261632! I then tried making $n=5^9 (=1953125) and my code stopped at 1952392. So its definitely not a memory issue. This should be simple enough but I can't figure out what's wrong with my code. Help a newbie?

Answer 1

Suffering from buffering?
When I add a sleep 1000 to the end of your program, stream the output to a file, and read the tail of the file, I also observe the last numbers to be printed are 261632 and 1952392. The remaining output is stuck in the output buffer, waiting for some event (the buffer filling up, the filehandle closing, the program exiting, or an explicit flush call) to flush the output.
The buffering can be changed by one of the following statements early in your program
$|= 1;
STDOUT->autoflush(1);

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $k = 9;
my $n = 4 ** $k;
my #clump = (0) x $n;
print join(' ', #clump), "\n";
printf "%d elements in \#clump\n", scalar #clump;
Or,
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $k = 9;
my $n = 4 ** $k;
my #clump;
$#clump = $n - 1;
$_ = 0 for #clump;
print join(' ', #clump), "\n";
printf "%d elements in \#clump\n", scalar #clump;
Output:
...
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
262144 elements in #clump
Also, note that initialization with 0 is almost never required in Perl. Why do you need this?