Im fully aware of this. I use this technique myself. Perhaps you mis-read me? The figure chosen is not arbitrary: $30 (48 dec) characters allows for just that. And I didnt choose it.tofro wrote:I don't argue on that as well
There is quite good reasoning behind long job names in some cases (like QD incorporating the full file name of the file edited in its name, or a linker incorporating its command line,.... ). Such stuff can actually add valuable information to a job display.
Its not just the tooling. If your job is loaded as a Thing, getting its name in the standard way gives you the Thing name. If you rely on that name to hold any meaningful information beyond 48 char, you could get the wrong result. As it happens, if the info you want is a simple file name, the current guidelines provide sufficient room for file names.As long as tooling simply displays parts of the job name within its own limits, I'm perfectly fine with having the end sliced off. But ruling on an arbitrary length just for the sake of a rule is not a good idea either
There are almost always limits somewhere. Qlib limits names to just 22 char, the latest Turbo to 36 (IIRC. Other versions have other limits, as does SuperCharge). I dont know about MBASIC. I guess something like a Pascal compiler also needs some idea as to how much room to leave to the job name.. which is how we got here.
Martin Head wrote me a nice hack to stretch a Qlib job's name length to any limit. (A copy can be found at Knoware.no) So its normally possible to work around any restrictions.
Ideally, compilers and such should offer the possibility to set the max name length and the given name separately. Then jobs with a fixed, short name neednt take up unnecessary space, and jobs with different requirements can have as much space as they need.