Maximum Method Name Length

compiler-construction programming-languages specifications name-length
Josh picture Josh · Jan 8, 2009 · Viewed 23.8k times · Source

Does anyone happen to know what the maximum length of a method name is in your programming language of choice? I was going to make this a C# specific question, but I think it would be nice to know across the spectrum.

What are the factors involved as well:

  • Does the language specification limit this?
  • What does the compiler limit it to?
    • Is it different on 32bit vs 64bit machines?

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Jan 8, 2009

For C# I don't believe there's a specified hard limit. (Section 2.4.2 of the C# 5 spec doesn't give a limit, for example.) Roslyn v2.2.0.61624 seems to have a limit of 1024 characters; this is way beyond the bounds of readability and even a sensible machine-generated name.

For Java, section 3.8 of the spec states:

An identifier is an unlimited-length sequence of Java letters and Java digits, the first of which must be a Java letter.

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