Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.

This is Episode 70. Today I'm talking with George Peter Banyard, about a new RFC that he's just proposed for PHP 8.1, which is titled explicit octal literal. Hello George, would you please introduce yourself?

Hello Derick, I'm George Peter Banyard, I'm a student at Imperial College London, and I contribute to PHP in my free time.

Excellent, and the contribution that you're currently have up is titled: explicit octal literal. What is the problem that this is trying to solve?

Currently in PHP, we have four types of integer literals. So decimal numbers, hexadecimal, binary, and octal. Decimal is just your normal decimal numbers; hexadecimal starts with 0x, and then hexadecimal characters so, null to nine and A to F, and then binary starts with 0b, and then it's only zeros and ones. However, octal notation is just a decimal, something which looks like a decimal number, which was a leading zero, which doesn't really look that much different than a decimal number, but it comes from the days from C and everything which just uses like a zero as a prefix.

But I have seen is people using like array keys for the, for the month names right and they use 01, 02, 03, you get 07, and 08 and 09, and then they look at the arrays. They notice that they actually had the zeroth element in there but no, but no eight or nine. That's something that is that PHP no longer does I believe. No, it's mostly that the parser doesn't pick it up anymore. Instead of silently ignoring the eight, it'll just give you an error. You've mentioned that there's these four types of numbers with octal being the one started with zero. But what's the problem with is that a moment?

Sometimes when you want to use, which looks like decimal number. So, for example, you're trying to order months, and use like the full two digits for the month number, instead of just one, you use 01, as an array key. When you get to array, it will parse error because it can't pass 08 as an octal number, which is very confusing, because it. Most people don't deal with octal numbers that often, and you would expect everything to be decimal. Because numeric strings are always decimal, but not integers literals. So, the proposal is to add an explicit octal notation, which would be 0o. So python does that, JavaScript has it, Rust also has it, to allow like a by more explicit to say oh I'm dealing with an octal number here. This is intended.

Beyond having the 0b for binary, and the 0x for hexadecimal, the addition of 0o for octal is the plan to add. And is that it?

That's more or less the proposal. It's non-BC, because the parser before would just parse or if you had 0o, so t