On 27 Aug, 18:31, Ethan Furman <et...@stoneleaf.us> wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > A mistake is still a mistake even if it shared with others. > > > Treating its with a lead zero as octal was a design error when it was > > first thought up > > [snippage] > > I have to disagree with you on this one. The computing world was vastly > different when that design decision was made. Space was at a premium, > programmers were not touch-typists, every character had to count, and > why in the world would somebody who had to use papertape or punch cards > add a lead zero without a *real* good reason? I submit that that real > good reason was to specify an octal literal, and not a decimal literal. Nice idea. Characters were expensive but not that expensive - even then. One extra character to make the octal prefix 0t or 0q or something could have been used. Check out the History heading at http://sundry.wikispaces.com/octal-zero-prefix Note how B migrated away from both BCPL's octal and its hex notation. #<octal> and #x<hexadecimal> in BCPL became 0<octal> and 0x<hexadecimal> in B James -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
