A lot of things arbitrarily limit what they can do to more "human friendly" numbers.
Wouldn't max value for 8 bit (unsigned) integer be 255? Like the number has 256 distinct values, but that includes 0.
If this is about a counter for users in the chat, sure. But if this is an array of users indexed by an 8-bit number, then it will fit 256 slots with the first slot being numbered 0.
Right but having a group chat of size 0 isn’t very useful.
Not to be snarky, in programming there's rarely (in situations like this) a reason to keep count. Computers are exceptionally good at counting integers so they'd just count individual client id's (however they've implemented that system), not keeping toll on how many clients are in a group chat.
So one client, be it at position zero is a one client group. Add another client at position one and you have two clients and a two person group.
I don't think it's the variable for counting the number of us in a group that's the issue here. There'll be some internal tracker that gives everyone in the chat group a local ID probably for the purposes of ensuring that everyone stays in sync.
If you leave the group and then go into a different chat group you'll probably have a different number in that group because the internal counter is specific to the chat, not to the user ID which will be a unique ID used across all interactions for that phone number.
What would 0 represent then?
The limit isn't on the actual count of people, it's likely the size of the chat user id number.
In this case the limit was entirely arbitrary.
The programmers were told to pick a limit and they liked 256. There are issues with having a large number of people in a group, but it wasn't a hardware limit for this particular case.
But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number
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