Is the world coming to an end?

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sun Apr 3 08:35:45 PDT 2011


On 4/3/11 6:24 AM, spir wrote:
> On 04/03/2011 10:37 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> That said, I woudn't have a problem with 0o... being used instead
>> (Although
>> I'd actually prefer 0c...). But I have a hard time understanding why
>> people
>> are making such a big deal out of something that practically no one ever
>> uses anyway. Consistency is nice, sure, but when it's such a trival
>> corner-case as octal: Why even care? This isn't the color of the
>> bikeshed,
>> this is the *shade* of color on the underside of the trim on a window
>> that's
>> one foot off the ground and completely blocked by a big tree.
>
> What I fail to see is the advantage of introducing an exception for
> octal. Either it is left out of the language (including stdlib, possibly
> having around a 3rd party hack for it), or the same pattern is used as
> for hex and bin.

Right now octal constants are indeed out of the language.

> A point is stating a threshold of usefulness. Seems nearly everyone
> agrees octal is not worth it: then just say bye. If it kept instead
> because of historical reasons (what I guess is the case), then just
> *fix* the syntax. Introducing a feature (an exception) for a nearly
> useless notion is weird.

This is not a feature. It is effectively "bye".


Thanks,

Andrei


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