title: Octal number literals: When? Why? Ever?
body: <p>I have never used octal numbers in my code nor come across any code that used it (hexadecimal and bit twiddling notwithstanding).</p>
  
  <p>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?</p>