Just noticed that \251 in octal is equal to 169 decimal.  (but I'm sure
everybody's going to tell me that:-)

But why octal?  The last time I used base-8 for anything was when I used
a Digital PDP 8 computer with a twelve bit word length, and octal made
sense there as each octal digit correspods to three bits, so a twelve
bit number can be represented in exactly four octal digits.  Nowadays
we use 8-bit bytes, which don't fit exactly into octal digits.

Phil Taylor


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