Why are Oracle table/column/index names limited to 30 characters?

Question

I can understand that many years ago there would be this kind of limitation, but nowadays surely this limit could easily be increased. We have naming conventions for objects

Answer 1

I believe it's the ANSI standard.

EDIT:

Actually, I think it's the SQL-92 standard.

A later version of the standard appears to optionally allow for 128 character names, but Oracle doesn't yet support this (or has partial support for it, insofar as it allows 30 characters. Hmmm.)

Search for "F391, Long identifiers" on this page... http://stanford.edu/dept/itss/docs/oracle/10g/server.101/b10759/ap_standard_sql001.htm

(Looking for a ref)