On Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:14:25 -0500, Derek Martin wrote: > Assuming I'm right about that, then the use of a leading 0 to represent > octal actually predates the prevalence of using 0 in dates by almost two > decades. And while using leading zeros in other contexts is "familiar" > to me, I would certainly not consider it "common" by any means. Thus I > think it's fair to say that when this syntax was selected, it was a > rather good choice.
Except of course to anyone familiar with mathematics in the last, oh, five hundred years or so. Mathematics has used a positional system for numbers for centuries now: leading zeroes have been insignificant, just like trailing zeroes after the decimal point: 9 = 09 = 009 = 9.0 = 9.00 = 0009.000 etc. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
