Steven D'Aprano: > Obviously I can't speak for Ken Thompson's motivation in creating this > feature, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't to save typing or space on > punchcards.
The original implementation of UNIX was on a PDP-7 which was an 18-bit machine. Octal = 3 bits at a a time which evenly divides an 18-bit word whereas the 4 bits of hexadecimal do not. Early implementations of B were (according to Wikipedia) on the PDP-7, PDP-11 (a 16-bit machine) and Honeywell 36-bit mainframes. Octal was widely used on the PDP-11. DEC's PDP-11 Assembler defaulted to octal and didn't even support hexadecimal. The prefixes used in MACRO-11 for explicit radixes were ^D, ^O, and ^B. http://computer-refuge.org/bitsavers/pdf/dec/pdp11/rsx11/RSX11M_V2/DEC-11-OIMRA-A-D_MACRO_75.pdf Neil -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list