[Python-3000] Octal

[Guido van Rossum]

Great! Mind writing up writing up a PEP that summarizes the discussion
(a bit)? In particular it should explain (a) why we need octal
literals; (b) why leading-zero is bad; (c) why we don't need general
bases; (d) why 0t is the best choice. Oh, and please add 0b too;
there's no formal proposal for that yet. Thanks!

--Guido

On 3/14/07, Patrick Maupin <pmaupin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/14/07, Oleg Broytmann <phd at phd.pp.ru> wrote:
> >
> >       0b101010
> >       0c660
> >       0xffe
> >
> >    I.e. the first letter from "bin", the second from "oct", the third from
> > "hex". Also "0c" resembles "oc" from "oct".
>
> -1 on "c" It's too visually close to "0" in some fonts.
>
> +1 on "t"
>
> "t" does not appear in 'binary' or 'hexadecimal'
> "x" does not appear in 'binary' or 'octal'
> "b" does not appear in 'octal' or 'hexadecimal'
>
> And finally "c" means "character" in %s or PEP3101, and "t" is not yet
> defined as a type specifier.
>
> So just to couch it all in terms of a proposal:
>
> - In 2.6 and 3.0, we add 0t1234 as a valid octal number
> - In 2.6, we issue a deprecation warning for a leading literal 0 which
> is followed immediately by another digit.
> - In 3.0, that becomes an exception
> - If people really are still using octal that much, we should also
> consider adding it in to PEP3101.
>
> Regards,
> Pat
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)