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

Constraint violations get reported in SQLERRM which is limited to 255 characters, and which most clients use to make errors visible. I suspect increasing the allowable size of constraint names significantly would impact the ability to report on the violations (especially where a constraint violation has been bubbled up through a few layers of PL/SQL code).