restriction
n. A
bug or design error that limits a program's
capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can
quite work up enough nerve to describe it as a
feature. Often
used (esp. by
marketroid types) to make it sound as though
some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all
along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a
nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are
almost invariably false).
Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a
quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a
power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of
17 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number --- on
the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason
(involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less
flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are
always especially suspect.
