[Fran=E7ois Pinard] > ... > Hi there! I could probably debug an octal dump even today, the CPU= codes > are rather easy to remember :-). Many members of the PDP series we= re also > favouring octal. Isn't the Cray which was using a mix of hexadecim= al and > octal in dumps (or do I mix it with something else)? The early Cray software used only octal, since everyone there came fr= om CDC, and loved octal from 60-bit words, 18-bit address registers, and 6-bi= t characters (<http://www.cwi.nl/~dik/english/codes/intern.html>). Oct= al proved surprisingly pleasant for 64-bit words too! It left the sign = bit off by itself in the 22nd octal digit, and it was said that Seymour made = the exponent field in Cray floats 15 bits wide so that it would be easy t= o read off from octal dumps too. Octal was so deeply ingrained in Cray culture that a coworker filled = out her timesheet in octal once, 10 hours per day for her 2-week vacation, su= mming to 120 hours. Our boss signed off on it because it looked fine to hi= m. This is the same boss who loved to tell the story of taking his famil= y out for a drive, and excitedly exclaiming "Hey, kids! Look!! The odomet= er is about to flip over to 40000!". Of course it read 37777 at the time, = and when it flipped to 37778 "they looked at me funny, and my family life= was never the same again". Then Cray hired a bunch of young crybabies (like me), who-- with some justification --pointed out that octal dumps were really hard to scan= for character data, given that Cray had moved to 8-bit characters. > But this is history. It doesn't have to be. Unicode surely has nothing going for it over= CDC Display Code <wink>. > I would prefer decimal everywhere nowadays. Too bad that Unicode p= ushed > so strongly on hexadecimal, this is a bit anachronical. I suggested to Guido today that we deprecate decimal literals in Pyth= on, in favor of octal everywhere. A killer advantage is that every binary floating-point number can be printed exactly with a few dozen octal d= igits, and that should squash a lot of newbie complaints about confusing floating-point rounding errors. it's-all-about-doing-what's-best-for-the-children-ly y'rs - tim
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