Question

I have never used octal numbers in my code nor come across any code that used it (hexadecimal and bit twiddling notwithstanding).

I started programming in C/C++ about 1994 so maybe I’m too young for this? Does older code use octal? C includes support for these by prepending a 0, but where is the code that uses these base 8 number literals?

Answer 1

I recently had to write network protocol code that accesses 3-bit fields. Octal comes in handy when you want to debug that.

Just for effect, can you tell me what the 3-bit fields of this are?

0x492492 

On the other hand, this same number in octal:

022222222 

Now, finally, in binary (in groups of 3):

010 010 010 010 010 010 010 010