reply n.
See followup.
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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.