Re: binary literals (was Re: lcc first experience)

Chris Torek <nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
<snip>
> as it turns out, binary constants like this are actually quite
> error-prone.  I discovered it was better to go back to hexadecimal
> constants in quite a few cases.  The binary constants were mainly
> useful in short binary numbers (where hex-vs-binary became pretty
> much a matter of taste).
>
> If C were to steal another feature from Ada, we could fix this,
> *and* the equivalent problem with other large constants (in any
> base), by adding "_" as an ignored digit separator.  Then we could
> write:
>
>     0b1101_0110_0010_1101_1000_0101_1110_0000_0001_1110_1111_0001_0011

It is one of the things that never made the jump from BCPL to C.  BCPL
had:

 #b_1010_1110
 #o177
 1_234_567

(B had only decimal and octal, as far as I can tell.)

I miss the op****tunity for clarity.

-- 
Ben.