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A Use for Octal
I've been programming in C since 1985 and C++ since 1991, but I've never found a use for octal representation until now, aside from the permissions argument for chmod. I've done a lot of bit twiddling: hex has been indispensable and I've often wished for a built-in notation for binary constants (WinDbg uses
0yto denote binary literals and0nto denote decimal literals (when the radix is not ten)). Octal, however, has always seemed as vestigial as a human appendix.