Annoying octal notation

[Derek Martin]

John Nagle wrote:
> Yes, and making lead zeros an error as suggested in PEP 3127 is a
> good idea.  It will be interesting to see what bugs that flushes
> out.

James Harris wrote:
> It maybe made sense once but this relic of the past should have been
> consigned to the waste bin of history long ago.

Sigh.  Nonsense.  I use octal notation *every day*, for two extremely
prevalent purposes: file creation umask, and Unix file permissions
(i.e. the chmod() function/command).  

I fail to see how 0O012, or even 0o012 is more intelligible than 012.
The latter reads like a typo, and the former is virtually
indistinguishable from 00012, O0012, or many other combinations that
someone might accidentally type (or intentionally type, having to do
this in dozens of other programming languages).  I can see how 012 can
be confusing to new programmers, but at least it's legible, and the
great thing about humans is that they can be taught (usually).  I for
one think this change is completely misguided.  More than flushing out
bugs, it will *cause* them in ubiquity, requiring likely terabytes of
code to be poured over and fixed.  Changing decades-old behaviors
common throughout a community for the sake of avoiding a minor
inconvenience of the n00b is DUMB.

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D

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