toot by @nixCraft@mastodon.social
Except for the part about using OCT or DEC to talk about octal and decimal numbers is ok.
From wikipedia:
In programming languages, octal literals are typically identified with a variety of prefixes, including the digit 0, the letters o or q, the digit–letter combination 0o, or the symbol &[12] or $. In Motorola convention, octal numbers are prefixed with @, whereas a small (or capital[13]) letter o[13] or q[13] is added as a postfix following the Intel convention.[14][15] In Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS and REAL/32 as well as in DOS Plus and DR-DOS various environment variables like $CLS, $ON, $OFF, $HEADER or $FOOTER support an \nnn octal number notation,[16][17][18] and DR-DOS DEBUG utilizes \ to prefix octal numbers as well.
For example, the literal 73 (base 8) might be represented as 073, o73, q73, 0o73, \73, @73, &73, $73 or 73o in various languages.
Newer languages have been abandoning the prefix 0, as decimal numbers are often represented with leading zeroes. The prefix q was introduced to avoid the prefix o being mistaken for a zero, while the prefix 0o was introduced to avoid starting a numerical literal with an alphabetic character (like o or q), since these might cause the literal to be confused with a variable name. The prefix 0o also follows the model set by the prefix 0x used for hexadecimal literals in the C language; it is supported by Haskell,[19] OCaml,[20] Python as of version 3.0,[21] Raku,[22] Ruby,[23] Tcl as of version 9,[24] PHP as of version 8.1,[25] Rust[26] and it is intended to be supported by ECMAScript 6[27] (the prefix 0 originally stood for base 8 in JavaScript but could cause confusion,[28] therefore it has been discouraged in ECMAScript 3 and dropped in ECMAScript 5[29]).
I think 0o31 would be the "correctish" way a programmer/computer scientist would talk about it.
Explanation:
In decimal (DEC), we count to 9 before adding a new digit. For example, the number after 9 is 10, and the number after 19 is 20.
In octal (OCT), we count to 7 before adding a new digit. The number after 7 is 10 and the number after 17 is 20.
DEC OCT 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 10 9 11 10 12 11 13 12 14 13 15 14 16 15 17 16 20 17 21 18 22 19 23 20 24 21 25 22 26 23 27 24 30 25 31 I remember it being graffitti’d at Wean Hall at Carngie Mellon circa 1990. (about half way down architect’s leap for fellow CMU-nies, around fifth floor maybe?).
