"Walter Bright" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: >> On 03/26/2010 06:26 PM, Walter Bright wrote: >>> KennyTM~ wrote: >>>> On Mar 26, 10 11:32, Walter Bright wrote: >>>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote: >>>>>> Supporting it means it will "silently and disastrously break code" >>>>>> from anyone who tries to use a leading zero and *isn't* a C guru, >>>>> >>>>> You don't need to be a guru to know that. I was once a C newbie, and >>>>> never had any trouble with it. >>>>> >>>>> It isn't just C, either, the same syntax is used in C++, Objective-C, >>>>> Groovy, M4, Clojure, Go, Java, Scala, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, bash, >>>>> Python (2.6 and earlier) and Perl. >>>>> >>>>> (It is not used in C#, Python 3.0, Fortran, or VisualBasic.) >>>> >>>> And removed in ECMAScript 5 (next standard of Javascript). >>> >>> I didn't know that. But still, it's hard to be a programmer and not use >>> a language that has such literals. >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum > > I was responding to Nick's argument: > > ------------------------------ > Supporting it means it will "silently and disastrously break code" from > anyone who tries to use a leading zero and *isn't* a C guru, and very few > people these days are (I used C for years without being aware of that > octal syntax - it's only by dumb luck I didn't try to use a leading zero). > ------------------------------- > > where the statement of very few people being exposed to such literals is > the issue. I should have left in the fuller quote.
Using a language that has 0xxx-style octal literals and actually being aware of it are two different things. And I'd say that my assumption it was only C speaks to its obscurity.
