0nnn octal notation considered harmful

[Nick Sabalausky]

"spir" <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1504.1297453559.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> Hello,
>
> Just had a strange bug --in a test func!-- caused by this notation. This 
> is due in my case to the practice (common, I guess) of "pretty printing" 
> int numbers using %0nd or %0ns format, to get a nice alignment. Then, if 
> one feeds back results into D code, they are interpreted as octal...
> Now, i know it: will pad with spaces instead ;-)
>
> Copying a string'ed integer is indeed not the only this notation is 
> bug-prone: prefixing a number with '0' should not change its value (!). 
> Several programming languages switched to another notation; 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.
>

Yea, octal!"nnn" has already made the exceedingly rare uses of octal 
literals completely obsolete *long* ago. I know I for one am getting really 
tired of this completely unnecessary landmine in the language continuing to 
exist. The heck with std.xml, if anything, *this* needs nuked. If silently 
changed behavior is a problem, then just make it an error. Done. Minefield 
cleared.