Annoying octal notation

[MRAB]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:31:04 -0700, Ethan Furman wrote:
> 
>> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> A mistake is still a mistake even if it shared with others.
>>>
>>> Treating its with a lead zero as octal was a design error when it was
>>> first thought up
>> [snippage]
>>
>> I have to disagree with you on this one.  The computing world was vastly
>> different when that design decision was made.  Space was at a premium,
>> programmers were not touch-typists, every character had to count, and
>> why in the world would somebody who had to use papertape or punch cards
>> add a lead zero without a *real* good reason?  I submit that that real
>> good reason was to specify an octal literal, and not a decimal literal.
> 
> Octal with a leading 0 comes from B, which influenced C, which influenced 
> many languages. B was designed in 1969, the same year as Pascal, not the 
> 1950s -- six years *after* Basic, ten years after Lisp and Cobol, eleven 
> years after Algol, and thirteen years after Fortran. *None* of these 
> other languages use a leading 0 for Octal, and none of them are 
> particularly terse.
> 
> 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.