On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

>  Remember the
> autoincrement registers?  Even in those days they looked like a
> kludge, but they helped a lot.

I hardly ever used them, but I can't remember exactly why not.  I
remember writing quite a few subroutine libraries in PAL/8, and of
course you didn't want to steal them from the main program.

> It's funny how long octal clung on.  It should have gone away with 8
> bit bytes.

Octal made some sense on the PDP-11, with its 3-bit register fields,
even though the instructions were 16 bits.  I think the notation got
stabilized in the culture just because it was included in C.  In my
pre-announcement review of Go (not a work assignment, just something I
went and did when I was at Google) I urged them to remove octal from
integer, character, and string literals, but nope, they are still
there.  For one thing, it means that literals interoperate among C,
C++, and Go, though I don't know if that was the motivation.

>  But somehow I still have a soft spot for octal, and
> numbers like 7778 still look wrong.

/me chuckles.

> Hmm.  Am I expected to understand this?

No.