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I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048... Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?
32, 64, 128 etc. are all round numbers, counting in binary. They are powers of two. Since computers work in binary, they make logical sense.
1220mm is 4ft, and 18 and 25mm are three-quarters of an inch, and an inch respectively.
They were making a joke. That being said, im not familiar with lumber or imperial<->metric conversions so their second point was lost on me, so thanks.
Still odd, I very much doubt they use a 8bit variable to set this limit. What would this bring ?
Still odd
Actually, it's even.
Because 257's a crowd
Wouldn't max value for 8 bit (unsigned) integer be 255? Like the number has 256 distinct values, but that includes 0.
Right but having a group chat of size 0 isn’t very useful.
Not to be snarky, in programming there's rarely (in situations like this) a reason to keep count. Computers are exceptionally good at counting integers so they'd just count individual client id's (however they've implemented that system), not keeping toll on how many clients are in a group chat.
So one client, be it at position zero is a one client group. Add another client at position one and you have two clients and a two person group.
And programmers usually start counting at 0.
Your thinking indexing, 0 is still 0 when counting.
The number of distinct values are what matters.
That's a super old article as well.
They got rightfully roasted in the comments for not knowing even the most basic things about computing.
I remember thinking something similar when I was a kid modding Starcraft. Max levels/ranks in researching was 256 and I always wondered why such a weirdly specific number.