Why `symbolicName_t` is limited to 64 chars?

FIXTradingCommunity / fix-simple-binary-encoding

A FIX standard for binary message encoding

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Why `symbolicName_t` is limited to 64 chars? #152

Closed OleksandrKvl closed 2 years ago

OleksandrKvl commented 2 years ago

Looking and XSD I was surprised to find that symbolicName_t has max length set to 64. It looks artificial to me, is it really needed?

donmendelson commented 2 years ago

It is arguable what the max length should be, but having a limit has these potential benefits:

Limits resource allocation
Makes documentation more regular by limiting width of table columns
Possibly avoids errors in typing very long names

The current FIX specification limits message, component, code, and field names to 64 characters.

OleksandrKvl commented 2 years ago

I'm surprised FIX has this limitation too since those names are not part of the binary representation. Thanks for the answer.

kleihan commented 2 years ago

@OleksandrKvl my answer would be that there is no good reason to have extremely long field names. It forces the person defining such a name to focus on the most important terms representing the semantic of the field. The value 64 may seem arbitrary but I do not see an issue. Field names are often used for display purposes in GUIs or documentation. Legibility does not get better with even longer names. There was no technical reason for the limitation.