17 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
17 lines
2.7 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>restriction</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../R.html" title="R"/><link rel="previous" href="reply.html" title="reply"/><link rel="next" href="retcon.html" title="retcon"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">restriction</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="reply.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">R</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="retcon.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="restriction"/><dt xmlns="" id="restriction"><b>restriction</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> A <a href="../B/bug.html"><i class="glossterm">bug</i></a> or design error that limits a program's
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capabilities, and which is sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite
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work up enough nerve to describe it as a <a href="../F/feature.html"><i class="glossterm">feature</i></a>.
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Often used (esp. by <a href="../M/marketroid.html"><i class="glossterm">marketroid</i></a> types) to make it
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sound as though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers
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all along, or was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a
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nature no mere user could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost
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invariably false).</p><p>Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a
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quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power
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of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a
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list, everyone will know it is a random number — on the other hand, a
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limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based
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indexing in binary) and you will get less <a href="../F/flamage.html"><i class="glossterm">flamage</i></a>
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for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially
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suspect.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="reply.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../R.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="retcon.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">reply </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> retcon</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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