3 ms·

This is a poor argument. Firstly, "how many characters can someone have in their legal name" is decidedly not infinite, because it has to be sufficiently short

This is a poor argument. Firstly, "how many characters can someone have in their legal name" is decidedly not infinite, because it has to be sufficiently short that some governmental entity was willing to record it. Secondly, as a reply to a comment (quite reasonably) pointing out that 60 unicode characters may not be enough for a surprisingly large number of people, this makes even less sense. Memory and storage space are not infinite, but 128 bytes per name is still unreasonably low. One could buy a single 12TB hard drive and store the names of every single living human, allocating 1.5KB per person.

jquery 2y ago
> it has to be sufficiently short that some governmental entity was willing to record it. How short is that, exactly?
- margalabargala 2y ago
  It's not hard to apply an upper bound here. If you arrive at a government office when they open for the day, and try to spell out your name to the clerk, and are unable to finish before the office closes for the day, that name is too long. Realistically they will probably tell you to leave well before that. No one will have a legal name longer than the legal system will allow them to have.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
The point is, you are always going to exclude some number of people's names when you set constraints. So you have to decide what is right for your use case, just like with any other engineering decision. There's no such thing as "right" or "wrong" here, simply what is best for the context. 128 bytes for a name is going to be unreasonably low in some contexts (e.g. for Arabic names), but not for others (e.g. for American names).
- rat87 2y ago
  We live in a global society and there are plenty of Arab Americans so Arabic names are American names.
- kazinator 2y ago
  Upthread, I was the one who posited the 128 byte figure. It was for a surname, not full name. I now posit 50 unicode codepoints for a surname. Fit or fuck off.

jquery 2y ago

> it has to be sufficiently short that some governmental entity was willing to record it. How short is that, exactly?

margalabargala 2y ago
It's not hard to apply an upper bound here. If you arrive at a government office when they open for the day, and try to spell out your name to the clerk, and are unable to finish before the office closes for the day, that name is too long. Realistically they will probably tell you to leave well before that. No one will have a legal name longer than the legal system will allow them to have.

bigstrat2003 2y ago

The point is, you are always going to exclude some number of people's names when you set constraints. So you have to decide what is right for your use case, just like with any other engineering decision. There's no such thing as "right" or "wrong" here, simply what is best for the context. 128 bytes for a name is going to be unreasonably low in some contexts (e.g. for Arabic names), but not for others (e.g. for American names).

rat87 2y ago
We live in a global society and there are plenty of Arab Americans so Arabic names are American names.
kazinator 2y ago
Upthread, I was the one who posited the 128 byte figure. It was for a surname, not full name. I now posit 50 unicode codepoints for a surname. Fit or fuck off.