0nnn octal notation considered harmful

[bearophile]

spir:

> like 0onnn, which is 
> consistent with common hex & bin notations and cannot lead to 
> misinterpretation. Such a change would be, I guess, backward compatible; and 
> would not be misleading for C coders.

The 0nnn octal syntax is bug-prone, and not explicit, it's out of place in a language like D that's designed to be a bit safer than C.
The 0onnn syntax adopted by Python3 is safer, more explicit, it's good enough. But the leading zero syntax can't be kept in D for backwards C compatibility, so it needs to be just disallowed statically...

Walter likes the C octal syntax as a personal thing. Andrei prefers a syntax like octal!xxxx that's less compact, even more explicit, library-defined, and it has a corner case (when numbers become very large you need a string):
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/phobos/std_conv.html#octal

Bye,
bearophile