Is the world coming to an end?

Russel Winder russel at russel.org.uk
Sun Apr 3 00:12:54 PDT 2011


On Sat, 2011-04-02 at 18:36 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> Yes, except for something else - the rarity of need for octal literals. The only 
> modern usage I've seen of it is for file permissions.

What is the use for binary literals or hexadecimal literals, I can't
think of one.

Except perhaps specification of register save masks and control status
work literals -- which is of course where the octal stuff came from in
the first place in C and when the VAX replaced PDP, hexadecimal was
rapidly introduced. (*)

I would suggest that rather than discriminating against people who like
octal instead of decimal or hexadecimal, the solution of introducing
0o... in harmony with 0b... and 0x... -- and of course removing the
leading 0 octal literal convention -- is obviously the right solution.
It ticks all the boxes.


(*)  For anyone not immediately in the know here PDP had 8 registers and
VAX 16 so octal and hexadecimal were the natural bases for specifying
masks.  The 68000 also played a part.  The use of octal on the PDP
actually goes a lot deeper than this, cf. Unibus,  but it is all ancient
history now.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20110403/42f43c05/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list