[Python-Dev] Octal literals (original) (raw)

Andrew Koenig ark at acm.org
Tue Jan 31 23:17:22 CET 2006

Apart from making 0640 a syntax error (which I think is wrong too), could this be solved by requiring the argument to be a string? (Or some other data type, but that's probably overkill.)

That solves the problem only in that particular context.

I would think that if it is deemed undesirable for a leading 0 to imply octal, then it would be best to decide on a different syntax for octal literals and use that syntax consistently everywhere.

I am personally partial to allowing an optional radix (in decimal) followed by the letter r at the beginning of a literal, so 19, 8r23, and 16r13 would all represent the same value.

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