I&#39;m studying for the final exam for my introduction to C++ class.  Our professor gave us this problem for practice:

&gt; Explain why the code produces the following output: `120 200 16 0`
```#include &lt;iostream&gt;
using namespace std;
int main()
{
  int x[] = {120, 200, 16};
  for (int i = 0; i &lt; 4; i++)
    cout &lt;&lt; x[i] &lt;&lt; &quot; &quot;;
}
```

The sample answer for the problem was:
&gt; The cout statement is simply cycling through the array elements whose subscript is being defined by the increment of the for loop. The element size is not defined by the array initialization. **The for loop defines the size of the array, which happens to exceed the number of initialized elements, thereby defaulting to zero for the last element.** The first for loop prints element 0 (120), the second prints element 1 (200), the third loop prints element 2 (16) and the forth loop prints the default array value of zero since nothing is initialized for element 3. At this point i now exceeds the condition and the for loop is terminated.

I&#39;m a bit confused as to why that last element outside of the array always &quot;defaults&quot; to zero.  Just to experiment, I pasted the code from the problem into my IDE, but changed the for loop to `for (int i = 0; i &lt; 8; i++)`.  The output then changed to `120 200 16 0 4196320 0 547306487 32655`.  Why is there not an error when trying to access elements from an array that is outside of the defined size?  Does the program just output whatever &quot;leftover&quot; data was there from the last time a value was saved to that memory address?

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Why does the first element outside of a defined array default to zero?