The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

Posted Aug 9, 2018 9:47 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience by mrshiny
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

> The point is that yes, some people do need or prefer to use octal.

Or learnt on a language/system that encouraged people to use it (like C encourages hex).

I really can't remember that far back but I've never had a problem with octal because it was used quite extensively on Pr1me for PL/1 and FORTRAN when I first started programming what, 35 years ago now?

And seeing as Pr1mos is a Multics derivative, I guess that's where Unix got it from, too :-)

Cheers,
Wol

The Grumpy Editor's Python 3 experience

Posted Aug 9, 2018 11:52 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

There are few visible places where Unix uses octal, and the most prominent of those is probably file access permissions. Since these come in convenient packages of three bits, octal makes a lot more sense for them than, say, hexadecimal. Incidentally, file permissions are one aspect of Unix that doesn't seem to be influenced by Multics to any great extent.