John Roth wrote:
"Charles Hartman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
I know this isnt that big of a problem,
but i cannot think of one reason why they would not allow numbers preceded with a 0 to have a number
higher then a 7 in them...
And it seems very inconsistant to me...
I *love* questions I can answer! Answer: because that's how you tell Python you're entering an octal number.
That's a reason, but I don't consider it a good reason. I cannot, in fact, think of a single time when I've wanted to enter an octal number. Hex numbers, yes, but not octal.
I personally don't think the frequency of use warrents the special case syntax and the resultant confusion with novices.
I would agree with you, but it's there for historical reasons. This is a pretty common convention that Python (I believe) borrowed from C. Octal *used* to be useful, when there were machines with word sizes in multiples of 3 (e.g. 18- and 27-bit words), since one octal digit exactly represents 3 bits (just as one hex digit exactly represents 4 bits); now that almost the entire industry has standardized on power-of-2 word sizes, octal is nearly useless but is still carried about for backwards compatibility.
Jeff Shannon
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