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From: pws@ifh.de (Peter William Stephenson)
Message-Id: <9511030901.AA21400@sgi.ifh.de>
Subject: Octal interpretation
To: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu (Zsh hackers list)
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 10:01:46 +0100 (MET)
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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?)

*** Src/utils.c.oct	Wed Nov  1 11:12:11 1995
--- Src/utils.c	Fri Nov  3 09:45:49 1995
***************
*** 1104,1112 ****
  	    base = 10;
  	else if (*++s == 'x' || *s == 'X')
  	    base = 16, s++;
  	else
  	    base = 8;
!  
      if (base <= 10)
  	for (; *s >= '0' && *s < ('0' + base); s++)
  	    ret = ret * base + *s - '0';
--- 1104,1114 ----
  	    base = 10;
  	else if (*++s == 'x' || *s == 'X')
  	    base = 16, s++;
+ 	else if (*s == '8' || *s == '9')
+ 	    base = 10;
  	else
  	    base = 8;
! 
      if (base <= 10)
  	for (; *s >= '0' && *s < ('0' + base); s++)
  	    ret = ret * base + *s - '0';
*** Doc/zshmisc.1.oct	Sun Oct 29 11:52:06 1995
--- Doc/zshmisc.1	Fri Nov  3 09:46:30 1995
***************
*** 732,739 ****
  .BR let .
  Evaluations are performed using
  .I long
! arithmetic. Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal numbers.
! A leading \fI0x\fP or \fI0X\fP denotes hexadecimal.
  Otherwise, numbers are of the form
  [\fIbase\fB#\^\fR]\fIn\^\fP
  where
--- 732,741 ----
  .BR let .
  Evaluations are performed using
  .I long
! arithmetic. Constants with a leading 0 are interpreted as octal
! numbers, except in the special case that the 0 is immediately followed
! by an 8 or 9 (this allows processing of sections of time strings such
! as "12:08").  A leading \fI0x\fP or \fI0X\fP denotes hexadecimal.
  Otherwise, numbers are of the form
  [\fIbase\fB#\^\fR]\fIn\^\fP
  where

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77330
Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany.