Would anyone miss convertOctals?

[Paul Dupuis]

Never use octal. pretty much any entries theses days are decimal or 
hexadecimal. Even binary (bit shifting or masks) is exceedingly rare


On 6/9/2022 8:44 AM, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
> So I'm currently sitting here about to embark on fixing 
> <https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23653> (which is the 
> final thing to sort out before being able to merge my constant 
> expression patch) and I was reminded of 'convertOctals'.
>
> Now, generally, I am somewhat averse to actually removing any language 
> feature (even those we have deprecated, unless we absolutely have to!) 
> - however, I would really like to make convertOctals have no effect at 
> all in 10.0+ as it adds a disproportionate amount of complexity 
> compared to (what I think, at least) its utility is (particularly in 
> the context of things 'coming next' like the script compiler).
>
> So three questions:
>
>   1) Do you know what convertOctals is, and what it does?
>
>   2) If you do, have you ever actually used it in any scripts which 
> are actually still in use?
>
>   3) If you do use it in any scripts which are still in use, would you 
> be willing to change them to not use it?
>
>   4) If you do use/have used it, had you ever noticed that it has been 
> slightly broken for years?
>
> Now, its always better to offer a carrot when there is a stick (or in 
> this case, an axe) being wielded and the carrot in this case would be 
> to expand the numeric literal syntax to add both explicit octal and 
> binary number literals alongside hexadecimal:
>
>     0xabcdef - hex literal
>     0o777 - octal literal
>     0b101110101
>
> The key difference between 0o777 and using 0777 (with convertOctals 
> true) is that the former is not ambiguous at parse time, it doesn't 
> require a runtime property set to true in order for the engine to 
> convert the string to a number correctly.
>
> Please let me know your thoughts :)
>
> Warmest Regards,
>
> Mark.
>
> P.S. In the scheme of 'breaking changes' - we've already made a number 
> of them for 10 already, and my gut tells me removing convertOctals is 
> likely to cause less consternation than those we already have - but I 
> could be wrong!
>