I don't think there's any WG decision that I can cite
in response to this comment; I don't think we considered
identifier length, except inasmuch as we OK'd the grammar.
I suppose it might be useful to specify that identifiers
longer than, say, 1024 characters aren't guaranteed
to work.
On the other hand, Java seems to get away with silence
on this issue...
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/lexical.html#3.8
Does anybody have implementation-defined limits in their code?
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
Forwarded message 1
2.2 Initial definitions
The definition of "query variable" says that there are infinitely many.
This is not computationally realistic. It would be better to agree on
some suitable number of characters that all conforming implementations
must support as a minimum. This would provide guidance to users in
writing portable queries. Experience in the SQL community shows that
this issue can be a source of on-going problems, owing to the
differences between implementations regarding supported length of
identifiers. An explicit requirement should be stated in Appendix B,
"Conformance".
Fred Zemke