In article <mailman.591.1251468775.2854.python-l...@python.org>, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: >Steven D'Aprano wrote: <SNIP> >> 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. Even in 1969, hex was more common than octal, and yet hex >> values are written with 0x. My guess is that he wanted all numbers to >> start with a digit, to simplify parsing, and beyond that, it was just his >> programming style -- why call the copy command `copy` when you could call >> it `cp`? (Thompson was the co-inventor of Unix.) >> >Maybe it was because they were working on minicomputers, not mainframes, >so there was less processing power and storage available.
Not just any minicomputers: PDP11. Octal notation is friendly with the PDP11 instruction set. Groetjes Albert -- -- Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters. alb...@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
