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

All of these 'constraints' are left over responses to limitations imposed by processor architectures that hail from the 70s. Since that time processors have evolved to the point that these limitations are no longer necessary; they are just left over. However, changing them is a BIG deal for the writers of the RDBMS. Since these length limitatons affect everything downstream changing it willy nilly to accomodate say a longer procedure name can and probably will break a lot of other stuff such as exeception reporting, the data dictionary, etc., so forth and so on. I would require a major re-write of the Oracle RDBMS.