Message #172643

[AngelFish]

How do you know where the name ends, though? If the length isn't fixed, you have to either trawl through the entire name to find the next packet or store the size of the name in the packet. It'd also take up a lot more space than is necessary, since the user would only ever see the first four letters if they're the only things read. It's much better just to set a hard limit of 4 characters than to allow arbitrary length and deal with potential buffer overflows.