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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.
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