On Wednesday, 7 February 2018 at 16:51:02 UTC, Seb wrote:
For the same reason why octal literals have been deprecated
years ago:
https://dlang.org/deprecate.html#Octal%20literals
The library solution works as well and it's one of the features
that are rarely used and add up to the steep learning curve.
That's actually not the reason given. Octal literals had the
stupid leading 0. We should have just made it 0o instead.
The library solution does not work just as well, since it doesn't
work at all in some places. Behold:
http://dpldocs.info/experimental-docs/source/core.sys.posix.fcntl.d.html#L123
version (X86)
{
enum O_CREAT = 0x40; // octal 0100
enum O_EXCL = 0x80; // octal 0200
enum O_NOCTTY = 0x100; // octal 0400
enum O_TRUNC = 0x200; // octal 01000
That's from druntime. The comments being there indicate the hex
is not obvious in this context; the octal would be more
illustrative. But the lack of use of std.conv shows it wasn't
applicable where the literal was (since this is druntime, phobos
isn't available).
The octal library solution is brilliant. The genius who wrote
that code is clearly god-like and we should all fall to our knees
and worship his superior intellect. That pattern DOES have uses.
But for octal? It was a mistake. We should have just made it 0o.
Similarly, I think the mistake of hex strings is that they are
typed char[] instead of ubyte[]. Otherwise... they work ok. And
when learning, you don't need to know every bit. You'd just
ignore it unless you hit upon the niche where it matters. (that's
the way I learned basically all of D. my early D code is
virtually identical to my C code, a bit later, similar to old
style Java code. only after being in it for a while did i go nuts
mastering the language.)
