dynamic arrays{help}

so that is my whole script... what i want it to do is have $maxFun be a text document and the maximum number of lines in the text doc is 35 at any given time.. and then add each line as an element to my array ($v[]).  i just dont know how to create a blank array without using 35 ["",""...] as "blank" elements... is there an easy way to do this with a FOR loop? i feel that there is..
or should i just write out 35 variables and then $var1 = fileReadLine...... over and over.?
Thanks