octal numbers - how to use

belamy

I searched huge part of documentations and forums but something is wrong with Visual Studio C# 2010. Maybe I'm wrong but see my code below:

I try to use octal number constants and assign them to "int" variable.

// variable definition
byte L;

// first octal number 021 (17-decimal)
L = 021;
// After that line I see (on debug) L=21
// 021 was treated as decimal not octal !!!

// next test, octal number 056 (46-decimal)
L = 056;
// and I see (on debug) L=56, again wrong !!!

Why????

4 Replies

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Vulpes13y ago
One further thought.

Unlike C/C++, string literals can be used as cases in the switch statement in C#.

So, as long as you make the conversion to an octal string before entering the switch, you could use octal string literals for your cases.
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Vulpes13y ago
I agree that it is very disappointing that C# doesn't support octal literals, particularly as all the other leading .NET languages (VB.NET, C++/CLI and F#) do support them.

I suppose you could 'farm out' your octal work to a dll written in one of these languages and then add a reference to that dll to your C# project but it's a tedious workaround.

Instead of the switch statement, you could use an if/else if/else ladder.
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belamy13y ago
ok, but in switch/case I can not use Convert, only constant values. Unfortunately, I've to check my variable at a lot of cases. I use this variable to check a type of packet that is sending after my variable. All documentation uses octal values to describe type of packet. Poor Ms Visual C#, very poor. PS. I used a lot of compilers C/C++, and even C compilers for old 8-bit uP can use octal constant.
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Vulpes13y ago
Unfortunately, C# doesn't support octal literals, only decimal and hexadecimal. So 021 and 056 are interpreted as decimal 21 and 56 respectively.

FWIW, you can convert from and to octal strings with:

byte L = Convert.ToByte("021", 8);

// and

string oct = Convert.ToString(L, 8);

but, of course, that's not much use for arithmetic purposes.
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