Defining and overriding open and closed intervals

Question

I have been considering the following situation as part of documenting and interface (A) and an implementation (B) of that interface.

The interface A contains methods which involve the following two arguments:

1. A percentage, passed as an integer.
2. A name, passed as a string.

The valid values for the percentage are the closed range [0, 100]. No matter how you implement the interface, it is an error to allow a value outside this range as an input.

The name, as defined in the interface, allows any string containing [1, 100] characters. I want to document the interface in such a way that it neither requires nor disallows an implementation to support a name with more than 100 characters.

Clearly the valid range for percentage is a closed, inclusive interval. How would you refer to a range like I defined above for the number of characters in name? I can't refer to the interval as right-open, because the implementation might not support values with more than 100 characters.

Answer 1

I don't believe there's a specific name for it, you'll probably have to write it out, e.g.:

The minimum length of name must be 1. There is no strict maximum length, but any implementation must support a maximum length of at least 100.

This is more concise, although somewhat less clear:

Any implementation must support a minimum length of name of 1 and a maximum of at least 100.

You can also write:

Any implementation must support the length of name in the range [1,x], with x >= 100 (x is chosen by the implementation).

Which is similar to your comment in the question on CS which was lost in the merge.

It might also be a good idea to add this to any / all of the above:

... and throw a YouNeedToRenameThis exception when outside this range.