The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

Posted Aug 3, 2018 5:46 UTC (Fri) by madhatter (subscriber, #4665)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience by mrshiny
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

You're right, you didn't, and I apologise for the imputation. But if all you wanted to do was celebrate the shift to 0o for octal, in which celebration I'd have joined you, why make a sweeping and unsupported statement about the general lack of usage of octal?

The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

Posted Aug 3, 2018 17:14 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

The general lack of usage of octal, especially in non command-line use, is what makes this change even possible in the first place. Granted, Python 3 broke lots of old programs on purpose in order to make improvements, but this change is happening in other languages too, and this sort of widespread change would certainly be much more difficult if octal were widely used.

Not to mention that the danger of falling into the "Accidentally used an octal literal when I meant a decimal" trap is much reduced if octal is so commonly-used a feature that everyone is aware of it.

Most programmers simply aren't specifying unix file permissions on a constant basis. Just think of every Android or MacOS or iOS or Windows or Javascript programmer, or even web programmers on Unix. File creation is rare, and file creation with specific permissions is rarer, and file creation with specific permissions on a Unix-like filesystem is rarest. I don't need to take a census to know this is true.