[Python-3000] Octal

[Greg Ewing]

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