removal of cruft from D

[Bill Baxter]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Justin Johansson <no at spam.com> wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Lars T. Kyllingstad
>> <public at kyllingen.nospamnet> wrote:
>>>
>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>
>>>> "Yigal Chripun" <yigal100 at gmail.com> wrote in message
>>>> news:he6sqe$1dqu$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>>>
>>>>> Based on recent discussions on the NG a few features were
>>>>> deprecated/removed from D, such as typedef and C style struct
>>>>> initializers.
>>>>>
>>>>> IMO this cleanup and polish is important and all successful languages
>>>>> do
>>>>> such cleanup for major releases (Python and Ruby come to mind). I'm
>>>>> glad to
>>>>> see that D follows in those footsteps instead of accumulating craft
>>>>> like C++
>>>>> does.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> As part of this trend of cleaning up D before the release of D2, what
>>>>> other features/craft should be removed/deprecated?
>>>>>
>>>>> I suggest reverse_foreach and c style function pointers
>>>>>
>>>>> please add your candidates for removal.
>>>>>
>>>> s/reverse_foreach/foreach_reverse/ ;)
>>>>
>>>> 1. Floating point literals without digits on *both* sides!!! "1.", ".1"
>>>> --> Useless hindrance to future language expansion!
>>>>
>>>> 2. Octal literals! I think it'd be great to have a new octal syntax, or
>>>> even better, a general any-positive-inter-base syntax. But until that
>>>> finally happens, I don't want "010 == 8" preserved. And I don't think
>>>> the
>>>> ability to have an octal literal is important enough that lacking it for
>>>> a
>>>> while is a problem. And if porting-from-C really has to be an issue,
>>>> then
>>>> just make 0[0-9_]+ an error for a transitionary period (or forever -
>>>> it'd at
>>>> least be better than maintaining "010 == 8").
>>>
>>> It would definitely be a problem if octal literals disappeared from the
>>> language, even if only for a short while. They are pretty much the only
>>> sensible way to specify POSIX file permissions.
>>>
>>>  import core.sys.posix.sys.stat;
>>>  ...
>>>  chmod("path/to/file", 0755);
>>
>> Well you can always do..
>>
>> chmod("path/to/file", octal(755));
>>
>> --bb
>
> octal(755)?
>
> What's the base-10 identity of that?
>
> decimal(493) or decimal(755)?
>
> base-16 etc.

Fine.  Make it octal!"755" if you prefer.
The point is just that you can write a function that will convert a
number to octal for the rare cases when you need it.
You don't absolutely need octal literals.

--bb