Re: Octal interpretation

[Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>]

> I am heartily sick of being told my stack is unbalanced because the
> time happens to be 12:08.  Based on the following two facts,
> 
> 1) No valid octal number ever starts 08 or 09
> 
> 2) 08 and 09 are the only two digit numbers evaluated incorrectly
> 
> I would like to propose that zstrtol explicitly checks for an 8 or a 9
> following the 0 and if there is one evaluates it in decimal.  This
> will mean times can be handled properly --- what I mainly use
> arithmetic in zsh for anyway --- while real octal numbers won't be
> affected.
> 
> Anybody writing scripts for users where this may matter should in any
> case be stripping leading 0's as a matter of course.  If that's a big
> problem, we should simply remove octal handling.  (What's wrong with
> 8#77 etc. anyway?  Isn't this just why ksh introduced that syntax?)

I've been planning on getting back to this.  My first thoughts are to
just reverted back to decimail as the default.

rc