Would anyone miss convertOctals?

[Ben Rubinstein]

1) No (or didn't until I looked just now)
2) N/A
3) N/A
4) N/A


On 09/06/2022 13:44, 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!
>