[Python-3000] Octal (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Mar 14 06:38:27 CET 2007

Josiah Carlson wrote:

Do we deprecate it followed by a later removal (so as to "resist the temptation to guess")? If so, sounds good to me (I've never had a use for octal literals).

I think that some syntax should be provided for octal literals. They're useful when you're translating constants from a C header file that are expressed in octal. I'd suggest

0o123

except that the lower case 'o' might be a bit hard to spot. :-(

Maybe something more general could be used to indicate a number base, such as

1101(2)     # binary
1234(8)     # octal
1c3a(16)    # hexadecimal
12g7(35)    # why stop at 16?

Since calling a built-in integer never makes sense, this would be unambiguous.

Making them decimal instead, I think, would be a mistake.

Perhaps an all-digits literal with a leading zero should be disallowed altogether. That ought to prevent any accidents.

-- Greg

More information about the Python-3000 mailing list