Is the world coming to an end?

[Russel Winder]

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 would suggest that rather than discriminating against people who like
octal 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.


(*)  For anyone not immediately in the know here PDP had 8 registers and
VAX 16 so octal and hexadecimal were the natural bases for specifying
masks.  The 68000 also played a part.  The use of octal on the PDP
actually goes a lot deeper than this, cf. Unibus,  but it is all ancient
history now.

-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
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