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

Chris Rebert cvrebert at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 07:17:15 CET 2007

I agree that octal should still have a syntax. However, as you say, 0o doesn't jump out as much typographically. And I'm wary of adding arbitrary base literals to the language. It sounds like unnecessary complexity, though a standard library function to convert arbitrary base representations of ints to ints might be useful. At any rate, I'd like to propose the octal syntax:

 0c123

I like this because "0c" looks like the start of the word "octal", and, as with your suggestion, the 0[character-here] prefix makes for a nice symmetry with "0x" for hex.

Greg Ewing wrote:

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

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