Octal Literals

[Dave X.]

On Tuesday, 17 July 2012 at 22:35:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 23:53:47 +0200
> "Dave X." <dxuhuang at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm a fresh college graduate who just got a job as a software 
>> developer, and I have been enthusiastically watching D for a 
>> while now (I program primarily in Java and C). I have some 
>> functional programming experience in Haskell and Scala as well.
>> 
>
> I wish D had been as far along as it is now back when I was in 
> college!
>
>> I like using octal numbers, and I've always been interested in 
>> D's octal literals. I'm glad to see that the traditional 
>> syntax of C's octal literals is being replaced by a more 
>> readable one. However, I can't help but think that the 
>> template solution ("octal!nnn") is a little too roundabout; is 
>> there a reason that that the "0o" prefix, which is already 
>> well established in languages like Haskell, OCaml, and Python, 
>> is not used?
>
> It was suggested a few times, but there was a lot of 
> bikeshedding over
> it. Some people liked it, some hated it. One of the bigger 
> objections was that octal literals were too rarely-needed to 
> justify adding a
> new syntax into the language (this was at a time when D was far 
> enough
> along that we were trying to start stabalizing the langauge 
> rather
> than tossing in more stuff). The bikeshedding went around and 
> around
> like that for awhile, during which time the awful old 0123 
> octal syntax
> remained.
>
> So when it was discovered that D's templates made it possible to
> implement octal literals in the library (octal!123), instead of 
> in the
> language itself (0o123), that solved the deadlock and we went 
> with it.

Thanks! I guess I'll get used to it.

Not that this really matters, but out of curiosity, how does this 
template work?