Chris Angelico wrote:
Octal makes a lot of sense in the right contexts. Allowing octal literals is a Good Thing. And sticking letters into the middle of a number doesn't make that much sense, so the leading-zero notation is a decent choice.
Also it's easy to forget that octal was a big part of the PDP-11 culture back then, even though it didn't fit all that well with a byte-oriented machine, largely due to earlier PDP models having multiple-of-3 word sizes. Programmers of that era probably dealt with octal numbers more often than either hex or decimal. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list