Re: The "leading zero means octal" thing...

On 04.01.2025 23:14, Kenny McCormack wrote:

First of all, yes, I know this is all standardized and it is based on
legacy C conventions and it can't be changed and so on and so forth.
 
But if not a bug, it is certainly a misfeature.
 
I am referring, of course, to the convention that a number with a leading
zero is interpreted as octal.  I can't count the number of times I've been
bitten by this - in various languages/environments all across the Unix
ecosystem.  Note the choice of newsgroups above - I have been affected by
this in each of these environments - most recently in Tcl (Expect) and in
the VIM editor.
 
In fact, the really obnoxious part about it is that it means a number
string like "08" is invalid, because 8 is not a valid digit in octal.  I
wish there was a global way to turn this off - some option to set that says
"Don't do that!".  I realize, of course, that it has to be on by default,
but it should be possible to turn it off.
 
Incidentally, and this was my motivation for posting this rant, I hit this
in VIM - where if the cursor is sitting on the zero in a string like Foo07
and you hit ^A, it changes it to - are you ready? - not Foo08, but Foo010.
 
Totally weird and unexpected.

Yes.

(You can find this complaint also already mentioned on the Web
in 2012, maybe even before. I suppose it's hard to do or change
anything as default behavior now.)

As a consequence, in Kornshell, I'm using a number prefix 10# to
counter that misbehavior. (I'd suppose this works also in other
major shells like Bash.)

In Vim there's a "sensible.vim" plugin available. (But I've not
tried it.) Given the tons of options in Vim I wonder why they
haven't supported an option to fix it inherently.

Janis