XPost: comp.lang.tcl, comp.unix.shell   
   From: janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com   
      
   On 04.01.2025 23:14, Kenny McCormack wrote:   
   > First of all, yes, I know this is all standardized and it is based on   
   > legacy C conventions and it can't be changed and so on and so forth.   
   >   
   > But if not a bug, it is certainly a misfeature.   
   >   
   > I am referring, of course, to the convention that a number with a leading   
   > zero is interpreted as octal.  I can't count the number of times I've been   
   > bitten by this - in various languages/environments all across the Unix   
   > ecosystem.  Note the choice of newsgroups above - I have been affected by   
   > this in each of these environments - most recently in Tcl (Expect) and in   
   > the VIM editor.   
   >   
   > In fact, the really obnoxious part about it is that it means a number   
   > string like "08" is invalid, because 8 is not a valid digit in octal.  I   
   > wish there was a global way to turn this off - some option to set that says   
   > "Don't do that!".  I realize, of course, that it has to be on by default,   
   > but it should be possible to turn it off.   
   >   
   > Incidentally, and this was my motivation for posting this rant, I hit this   
   > in VIM - where if the cursor is sitting on the zero in a string like Foo07   
   > and you hit ^A, it changes it to - are you ready? - not Foo08, but Foo010.   
   >   
   > Totally weird and unexpected.   
      
   Yes.   
      
   (You can find this complaint also already mentioned on the Web   
   in 2012, maybe even before. I suppose it's hard to do or change   
   anything as default behavior now.)   
      
   As a consequence, in Kornshell, I'm using a number prefix 10# to   
   counter that misbehavior. (I'd suppose this works also in other   
   major shells like Bash.)   
      
   In Vim there's a "sensible.vim" plugin available. (But I've not   
   tried it.) Given the tons of options in Vim I wonder why they   
   haven't supported an option to fix it inherently.   
      
   Janis   
      
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