Is the world coming to an end?

[Walter Bright]

On 4/3/2011 12:12 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> 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 still prefer binary for that. It takes me a senior moment or two to remember 
what bit pattern 0xB is, for example.


> I would suggest that rather than discriminating against people who like
> octal

The phrase "discriminating against people" has a lot of emotional baggage 
associated with it that is irrelevant to this.


> 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.

Except the box of a kitchen sink of features of marginal utility. A feature that 
can be handled adequately by the library should not be part of the core language.

And yes, you can make a reasonable case that 0b should be ditched for the same 
reason.