Walter Bright wrote:
Christopher Wright wrote:
>> Georg Wrede wrote:
-- All very nice, but no cigar. That's about as smart as letting
people define *unlimited* length variable names!)
I recently dealt with a programming language that specified a limit of
63 characters for identifier names. This wouldn't have been a
significant problem, except that I was generating code automatically,
and some of my identifiers were over 90 characters. Identifier length
limits are evil, unless they're ridiculously large (C#, I think,
limits identifiers to 4096 characters).
As soon as you put in a limit on identifier name length, sooner or later
you'll get a bug report on it.
For example, C++ can be compiled to C code. C++ templates encode their
entire state into the template instance identifier, and these can easily
reach 10,000 characters or more. So if your C compiler has a length
limit on identifiers, then C++ templates become severely limited.
Another thing to consider is it's actually *more* work to put a limit
on, where you have to document it, explain it, detect it, diagnose it,
recover from it, than if you just make it unlimited.
There are really only 3 numbers in computer programming: 0, 1, and
unlimited. I always chuckle when I see an ad for like, an editor, that
says "up to 5 files open at once!".
I take it back.
