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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Hex string literals (was Re: C23 thoughts and opinions)
Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2024 17:20:12 +0200
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On 18/06/2024 11:39, Michael S wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jun 2024 22:39:00 -0700
> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:
> 
>> bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:
>>
>>> AFAIK nobody uses octal anymore.
>>
>> There are circumstances where being able to write constants
>> in octal is useful.  It also would be nice to be able to
>> write constants in base 4 and base 32 (because 5 is half
>> of 10).  I don't have occasion to prefer octal very often
>> but I'm glad it's there for those times when I do.
> 
> Ada/VHDL permits any base from 2 to 16. They didn't go as far up as
> 32.
> I would imagine that reading base 32 number would take time to become
> accustomed.

I can't imagine any possible use for such bases.  Base 16 is very 
common, and base 2 is useful in some circumstances.  Base 8 has, to my 
knowledge, a single non-archaic use-case and that is for chmod modes in 
*nix programming.

I think support for other bases exists in some languages as a 
side-effect of wanting an explicit numbered base notation for bases 2, 
16 and possibly 8, rather than using 0b, 0x and 0o (or 0q, or just 0 as 
an April fool's joke).

If I were the BDFL of C, I'd remove octal constants and add a macro 
"_Octal" with definition:

#define _Octal(n) (((n) % 10) + ((n) / 10 % 10) * 8 \
	+ ((n) / 100 % 10) * 64 + ((n) / 1000 % 10) * 512)


If anyone can present a good use for base 4 or base 32, I might change 
my mind :-)