[MUD-Dev] Re: let's call it a spellcraft

[Adam Wiggins]

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Vadim Tkachenko wrote:
> According to Jon A. Lambert:
> > It begs the question, "Is the fixed dimensional array evil?"
> 
> Ultimately, yes. If even you say that it doesn't make sense to do it
> variable because of, say, the OS limitations - who says the OS is gonna be
> there forever? (side note: WORA...)

Yup.  Just think of the guy that wrote Xsnow on his HP or Sun workstation
sometime in the 80's.  If someone had said, "Hey, did you know that folks
will be running this on their Intel-based personal computers on a freeware
UNIX/X based system ten years from now?", I'm sure he would have laughed
in their face at such silliness.  Yet it happened.  You can't predict the
changes that may happen around your code, but you *can* make it easy for
others to make those changes by writing code that doesn't depend on any
particular thing, just implements an algorithm in the loosest way
possible.

> Typical consequences of the "numerical mindset":
> 
> 8.3 filesystem

Or for that matter, many of the early OS's had limits like no
subdirectories, or only one level deep subdirectories, or only 512 files
in a given directory...etc.  There was actually any excuse for it back
then: every byte counted.  There isn't one now.

> Y2K problem in multiple variants (including Unix Y2038)

It depends on the problem.  Most of them, I agree.  Unix Y2038 I don't
agree.  From line 31 of the ANSI 4.12 time.h:

typedef long time_t;

Once we're all running 64-bit systems, "long" suddenly becomes huge, and
2038 is not a problem anymore.  Considering the large numbers of 64 bit
CPUs coming availible in the next two years, I think it's likely that
we'll all have such things by 2038.

What *is* a problem is all the programs that have assumed time_t is 32
bit, or any other size.

> buffer overflow bug (LINGERING FOR DECADES!!!)

Yup.  Or how about 32 bit IP addresses.  Once again, if you had confronted
the folks that decided on that size address back when "the internet" was a
couple dozen government computers connected to one another and said, "You
know...you're gonna cause big problems by limiting this network to a mere
four billion nodes" they wouldn't have been able to stop laughing.  But it
happened.

Adam