Tim Peters <tim.one@home.com>:
Vyper's octal notation is still ugly, but whoever first thought
0777 != 777
was a "good idea" was certifiably insane <0.25 wink>.
For anyone who doesn't know the history behind this... The 0xxx notation was copied from PDP-11 assembler literals -- the instruction-set design of the PDP-11 was such that most of the instruction subfields fit in octal digits, so this convention made it somewhat easier to read machine-code dumps. While I'm at it, I should note that the design of the 11 was ancestral to both the 8088 and 68000 microprocessors, and thus to essentially every new general-purpose computer designed in the last fifteen years. -- <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a> "Are we to understand," asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?" "I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals." -- Ayn Rand