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Re: How switch from escaped octal character code to escaped HEX?


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: How switch from escaped octal character code to escaped HEX?
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:03:48 -0500
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.0.50 (gnu/linux)

> What is the reasoning behind displaying it in octal rather than
> decimal or hexadecimal in the first place?

As mentioned by someone else, this goes back to the beginning of Emacs,
so we're talking >20 years ago.  IIUC octal was more common back then.

There are still some advantages to using octal: e.g., by using fewer
different chars, there is a higher likelihood that the boundary of the
\NNN sequence will be self obvious: when you see \01234, it's not
obvious that it's \012 followed by 3 and 4, but when you see \012ab the
boundary is self-evident.  With hexadecimal, the cases where the
boundary is not self-evident are more common.


        Stefan



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