[Tutor] String Replace..... [octal numbers]

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> That is, it has to do with "octal" numbers, that is, 
> numbers that are represented in terms of powers of 8's.  
> Python shows us the special characters (newlines, 
> tabs, etc.) in octal.  To tell the truth, I'm not
> quite sure why, but there's probably a good reason for it.  

The PDP computers that Unix was born on used octal 
for representing binary data. So Unix did the same. 
C was built to write Unix so used the same convention. 
Python is written in C and so followed C I guess.

Accidents of history are all around. :-)

Alan g