On 3 Sep, 15:35, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid> wrote: ...
> >>> Obviously I can't speak for Ken Thompson's motivation in creating this > >>> feature, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't to save typing or space on > >>> punchcards. Even in 1969, hex was more common than octal, and yet hex > >>> values are written with 0x. My guess is that he wanted all numbers to > >>> start with a digit, to simplify parsing, and beyond that, it was just his > >>> programming style -- why call the copy command `copy` when you could call > >>> it `cp`? (Thompson was the co-inventor of Unix.) > > >>Maybe it was because they were working on minicomputers, not mainframes, > >>so there was less processing power and storage available. > > > Not just any minicomputers: PDP11. Octal notation is friendly with > > the PDP11 instruction set. > > Indeed. Octal was the way that all of the DEC PDP-11 sw tools > displayed machine code/data. True. Octal was default in Macro-11 and what surprises me is that when I used it it seemed natural to think in octal (or, preferably, hex) rather than decimal. James -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
