I think there are a few reasons why you wouldn't want these. First and foremost, octal escapes (\nnn) are just an alternative equivalent to hex escapes (\xnn). Most software developers spend a lot more time dealing with hex when it comes to byte values, and very little time with octal literals outside of things like unix file permissions. The most useful octal literal would be \0, and this is already explicitly permitted in strict mode. So, I don't think there's any real compelling use case for the alternative representation of byte values. So to summarize, supporting these in strict mode would be adding another way to accomplish the same given task (which grows the language for no real reason and with no benefit), does not make string literals easier to read and understand, and does not enable software developers to perform any compelling task which was not more easily accomplished using hex literals. Finally, the most common use-case for this feature is already supported in strict mode.
More important, octal escape sequences are a bit liberal, in that they can be of several lengths, with a pretty wide range of delimiters. This, I think, results in many cases where octal escape sequences are used by accident, rather than intentionally. It's a footgun, and ideally that footgun should not be there. I feel like the "refactoring pain" argument is not very compelling, because I am not convinced beginners are likely to use octal literals on purpose (or even by accident). _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
