removal of cruft from D

[Don]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> Bill Baxter, el 20 de noviembre a las 15:43 me escribiste:
>>> octal(755)?
>>>
>>> What's the base-10 identity of that?
>>>
>>> decimal(493) or decimal(755)?
>>>
>>> base-16 etc.
>> Fine.  Make it octal!"755" if you prefer.
>> The point is just that you can write a function that will convert a
>> number to octal for the rare cases when you need it.
>> You don't absolutely need octal literals.
> 
> Please, understand this: IS NOT RARE IF YOU DO POSIX SYSTEM PROGRAMMING.
> 
> If you remove octals because they can be implemented in the library,
> remove hexa and binary literals as well. And please, stop using the
> argument of octal literal being rare, they aren't when programming using
> POSIX. You use the all over it when managing filesystem related stuff.

That's quite a false dichotomy! Octal literals are used for POSIX file 
systems calls, and pretty much nowhere else (These days, they're a 
PDP-11 relic, really, once hex was invented octal became obsolete). For 
example, I don't think arithmetic is ever done on octal values.
I don't believe octal!("317"); is so terrible -- it's still much shorter 
than the equivalent code on Windows! Especially considering that they 
should never appear in OS-independent code.

But it's a matter of little consequence. The problem really is that 
octal has this preferred status, 0123 looks far too normal for something 
which is so obscure.

> I do think octal literals should be 0oNNN (or 0cNNN, I prefer 0oNNN
> because it's already used by Python, so I would be very error prone to me
> when switching the language to remember which to use).