On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 11:40:23AM -0700, Luke Palmer wrote:
: Some time ago on perl6-documentation (when it existed) we decided that
: octals would now be represented as 0o777 and, in strings, \o777. Should
: 0777 and, in particular, \777 come with warnings? What, exactly, does
: \777 mean in a string?
It's probably best to make them completely illegal for now. At some future
point we might consider relaxing 0777 to be decimal, but that would be
possible only after the current octal usage pretty much dies out in the
culture, and that probably won't happen any time soon. Though I do truly
believe that the age of octals has passed.
Note that \1 is also illegal now in rules, since backrefs are done with $1.
I guess another question is what we do when we see \012. We probably
need to make that illegal too. It's far too soon to change over
to interpreting that as "{chr(0)}12". We'll have a hard enough
time convincing everyone to write "\o15\o12" instead of "\015\012".
Maybe we can get people to write "\xd\xa" now. But we really need to
put leading zeroes back to radix-neutral, or our great-grandchildren
will curse our lack of foresight.
Larry
