Octal Literals

[Dave X.]

I'm a fresh college graduate who just got a job as a software 
developer, and I have been enthusiastically watching D for a 
while now (I program primarily in Java and C). I have some 
functional programming experience in Haskell and Scala as well.

I like using octal numbers, and I've always been interested in 
D's octal literals. I'm glad to see that the traditional syntax 
of C's octal literals is being replaced by a more readable one. 
However, I can't help but think that the template solution 
("octal!nnn") is a little too roundabout; is there a reason that 
that the "0o" prefix, which is already well established in 
languages like Haskell, OCaml, and Python, is not used?