Annoying octal notation

[James Harris]

On 27 Aug, 18:31, Ethan Furman <et... at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> > A mistake is still a mistake even if it shared with others.
>
> > Treating its with a lead zero as octal was a design error when it was
> > first thought up
>
> [snippage]
>
> I have to disagree with you on this one.  The computing world was vastly
> different when that design decision was made.  Space was at a premium,
> programmers were not touch-typists, every character had to count, and
> why in the world would somebody who had to use papertape or punch cards
> add a lead zero without a *real* good reason?  I submit that that real
> good reason was to specify an octal literal, and not a decimal literal.

Nice idea. Characters were expensive but not that expensive - even
then. One extra character to make the octal prefix 0t or 0q or
something could have been used. Check out the History heading at

  http://sundry.wikispaces.com/octal-zero-prefix

Note how B migrated away from both BCPL's octal and its hex notation.

  #<octal> and #x<hexadecimal> in BCPL became
  0<octal> and 0x<hexadecimal> in B

James