On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 01:13:32PM +0000, Matthew Woodcraft wrote: > Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> writes: > > About the only place one commonly sees leading zeros on decimal > > numbers, in my experience, is zero-filled COBOL data decks (and since > > classic COBOL stores in BCD anyway... binary (usage is > > computational/comp-1) was a later add-on to the data specification model > > as I recall...) > > A more common case is dates.
I suppose this is true, but I can't remember the last time I hard-coded a date in a program, or worked on someone else's code with hard-coded dates. I'm fairly certain I've never done it, and if I had, I obviously would not have used leading zeros. I think hard-coding dates is more uncommon than using octal. ;-) [It unquestionably is, for me personally.] I tend to also discount this example, because when we write dates with leading zeros, usually it's in some variation of the form 08/09/2009, which, containing slashes, is a string, not a number, and can not be used as a date literal in any language I know. We do it for reasons of format, which again implies that it has more the characteristics of a string than of a number. To use such a thing in any programming language I can think of would require translation from a string. > I've seen people trip over this writing things like > > xxx = [ > date(2009, 10, 12), > date(2009, 12, 26), > date(2010, 02, 09), > ] I've never seen anyone do this (no doubt because it would be an error), but as I said, I don't think I've ever seen hard-coded dates in any programs I've worked on. I've never encountered anyone having problems with octals who was not a total noob at programming. The changing of this syntax seems like much ado about nothing to me, and as such is annoying, consider that I use it very often. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D
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