"\088" is legal syntax?

-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2011 5:30 PM
To: William Dunlap
Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] "\088" is legal syntax?

On 11-09-01 5:43 PM, William Dunlap wrote:

Is it intentional that the digit 8 is allowed
in octal escape sequences in character literals?

   >  "\110" == "\088"

   [1] TRUE

   >  "\8" == "\b"

   [1] TRUE

9's are rejected, so I'd expected 8's to be illegal as well.

It is documented that way in the R-lang manual, but I imagine it's just
a thinko.  It's been like that since octal escapes were added in 1998.
I wonder how much will break if I fix it?

Duncan Murdoch

   >  "\9"

   Error: '\9' is an unrecognized escape in character string starting "\9"

   >  "\091")

   Error: embedded nul in string: '\091'

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

sessionInfo()

R version 2.13.1 (2011-07-08)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
  [5] LC_MONETARY=C              LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base