Re: Why all the max length constraints?

"Marshall" <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com> wrote in message news:1148775197.195932.299730_at_y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> dawn wrote:
> > [why all the length constraints?]
>
> You asked a very general question, so I'm going to respond in
> very general terms.
>
> Length constraints are a physical reality. Your computer is finite,
> and it can only take so much data before choking. And there are
> times when software is buggy and will write data forever, filling
> up your disk or dbms or whatever. It is best if the entire system
> not die under those circumstances. (There are also times where
> such bad behavior is deliberate, as in denial-of-service attacks.)
> So no matter how it appears, there are real limits somewhere.
> Note that Java strings are conventionally referred to as variable
> length, but they are in fact a maximum of 2^31 characters long.
>
> Realistically, if you have a field for state/province, and someone
> enters 6 megabytes of character data, something has gone wrong
> somewhere. Better to trap it around character 255 than to
> let it just run along sucking up resources.
>
> There is nothing specific to RM here.
>

It's possible to design schemes for variable length data that is indefinitely extensible. The familiar decimal numbers are one such scheme. Within such schemes, it's possible to design schemes that are reasonably concise at the low end, and add only trivial amounts of overhead at the high end. Within such concise schemes, it's possible to design schemes that are more robust than ones that depend on separator characters, as some systems do. I'm exploring whether it's worthwhile to do so.

You are right. There is nothing specific to the RM here. Received on Sun May 28 2006 - 13:45:49 CEST