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]