restriction
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 (especially 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.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
resource fork « Resource Reservation Protocol «
Restricted EPL « restriction » Restructured
EXtended eXecutor » restructuring » retcon
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