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 107 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.

