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Zero one infinity rule

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Re: Zero one infinity rule

#51

Post by xlii »

eternalban wrote: post #37
xlii wrote: post #33

I have a feeling that a lot of commenters mix up structure design with structure implementation. Rule talks about the design (and I find approach interesting) yet implementation can (and most likely should) be limited. E.g. we are designing a world. In this design we say children can have toys. It doesn’t make sense to design universe so that children are limited to 5 toys or any other arbitrary number. But no room c…

Then change the name of the rule :) Zero, One, or Many . I think that would satisfy all concerned.

Absolutely agree. However that’s for the rule creator. I think that infinity in this context sounds slightly poetic.

Re: Zero one infinity rule

#54

Post by GauntletWizard »

layer8 wrote: post #40
cjfd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, John Carmack is a game programmer, at least originally. In games one has strong upper limits on how long it can take to calculate the next frame. So, it may very well be that something can be said for this in this context. I am not sure in general, though. If one limits the length of the name of a person in some record one can start waiting until one day a person arrives that has a name that is one character lo…

There should be limits. What if someone pastes the text of the bible into the name field? What if you want to send an email containing the name, and you hit the maximum email size accepted by the SMTP server (they all have a limit)? What if you want to send a postal letter and print the name on the envelope? Not setting explicit limits either means that you still have implicit limits, but you don’t know what they are…

I have legitimately used the complete works of William Shakespeare, unabridged, as a password. Even that is in megabytes, and not significant load for bcrypt2.

Not that there should be no limits at all, but the upper bound should be relatively high.

Re: Zero one infinity rule

#55

Post by pyuser583 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #13

While this has some theoretical merit, IME, limits are quite useful to catch bugs (or prevent degenerate cases). For example I was recently working on a permissions system wherein there can be members of groups. I set a reasonable limit on the size of a group based on a maximum of actual usage and what I could foresee being reasonable. A few days later, this limit was triggered, and I got a bug report. But it turned…

The Wiki page says the problem isn’t with limits, but with arbitrary limits.

When a program limits me to 256 of something, it doesn’t seem arbitrary.

I’ve heard stories of programmers setting limits to multiples of two simply so nobody asks why.

Re: Zero one infinity rule

#56

Post by jiggawatts »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #15
AlotOfReading wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should also be careful about incorrectly imposing limits on human input, as every "falsehoods programmers should know about x" repeatedly hits on. To continue the name example, there are people with legal names and titles that take far more than 64 bytes to store and truncation is not an appropriate solution. You should store the entire thing, even if that's a small bit more difficult technically. The other limit…

I think "should" is a bit strong here. There are always tradeoffs. Having support for very long names can cause other problems, like the opportunity for abuse, making it hard to format UIs, making human inspection of data much harder, or even limiting algorithmic efficiency. For example, US Passports have a relatively small limit for name length (I think it's around 20 characters each for first/middle/last).

“Who you are is inconvenient for me.”

Re: Zero one infinity rule

#57

Post by roflyear »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #3

John Carmack argued the opposite. He said he would hardcore limits into his data structures. Limits that would never be hit under normal operating circumstances. He argued that when you design software you should have an idea under what circumstances it will run and optimize for those. The fact that people normally don't do this, is why software often lags - that algo you implemented worked worked just fine when it's…

Only works when fail early is better than run slow which IME is not often the case

Re: Zero one infinity rule

#58

Post by asynchronous »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #54
layer8 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be limits. What if someone pastes the text of the bible into the name field? What if you want to send an email containing the name, and you hit the maximum email size accepted by the SMTP server (they all have a limit)? What if you want to send a postal letter and print the name on the envelope? Not setting explicit limits either means that you still have implicit limits, but you don’t know what they are…

I have legitimately used the complete works of William Shakespeare, unabridged, as a password. Even that is in megabytes, and not significant load for bcrypt2. Not that there should be no limits at all, but the upper bound should be relatively high.

Doesn’t bcrypt2 essentially truncate every source input to no longer than 35 characters?
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