Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

5-3. File Names and Structures

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

—Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

Because the restriction of file name length to 8 characters in earlier systems was truly dreadful, the 31-character maximum length offered by the Macintosh looked like heaven to many users. But this modification was just a different-size straitjacket. Aside from the real limits of the hardware, an interface should have few, if any, fixed-length limits. An interface should use dynamic memory allocation, linked lists, hashing, or whatever techniques seem best but should never present a user with ...