Number literals (Was: Re: Case Range Statement ..)

[bearophile]

Walter Bright:
> Not a significant issue, as the code to lex it is done, works, and is 
> readily available.

It's not an issue for the compiler, but a modern programming language has to be designed for programmers, to be as little bug-prone as possible. Literals as .5 and 5. are not correct in my natural language, they look ugly, and they are a bit dangerous. That's why I think it's better to disallow them.


>Translating C code to D.<

The main problem is turning a literal like 0555 into a syntax error, but failing silently or giving a different answer.
Now in Python 3+ literals like 0720 are disallowed, you have to use 0o720 instead. I was one of the people that have suggested and voted for this change. It's one of the few changes in Python that come from a suggestion of mine.

Regarding Python 3, it contains a single built-in module that's named 2to3, it's not too much long and it's quite useful:
http://docs.python.org/library/2to3.html
I think that writing a similar standard and built-in Python module to translate C/H code to D can be positive. Then all D distributions can contain it. Among the things it does it to reformat code and convert C octals to D octals :-)

Bye,
bearophile