Except that 'aa' ..'aaaaaaaa' which works is a bigger array than 'pfo' .. 'pctpfo', unless I'm completely misunderstanding how it increments them. I'm guessing there is some kind of optimization in that case? ... Either way why does Perl still allocate the memory during the -c check? (my machine crashed while using -c)

If it is just the size I suppose there's not a bug per se, but it would be nice if there was some kind of brake to keep Perl from running away with all the memory. I still say there is a bug though, at the very least -c shouldn't allocate the memory.