[Python-3000] Octal

[Tim Peters]

[Guido]
> Something got lost there in a last-minute edit. I meant to say:
>
> My main interest is that we should move away from just leading zero as
> octal; that we should disallow leading zero altogether because of the
> confusion it would cause for folks coming from other languagesl and
> that we should avoid the swamp that is generalized numeric bases. I'm
> neutral about the choice between 0o, 0c or 0t.

While I like the goal, I'd prefer not to be cryptically clever.  How
about restricting the base in Icon's clean syntax to one of {2, 4, 8,
16}?  Here's 10 in those four bases:

    2r1010
    4r22
    8r12
    16ra (or) 16rA

"r" is mnemonic for "radix" in this context.

The Ada syntax is similarly clean, but has both a leading & trailing
"bracket" character.  IIRC, that's because Ada wants to support
embedded whitespace in numeric literals.