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Subject: Re: PL/I outflanks Fortran
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> i'm not sure it matters whether i find it useful, after all you find only 4
> out of 15 to be useful.  i.e., that there is little common use for e.g base
> 9 did not prevent the language designers from providing for it, so why not
> the entire well defined range?

There is a subtle place where it matters, Ada.Text_IO.Integer_IO.Get 
reads a number (without a point) according to the syntax of an integer 
literal.  (Ada.Text_IO.Float_IO allows a point.)  This means that when 
reading a string like 23#ABCEDFGHI... the read will stop immediately 
after the F.  So as long as we are allowing A, B, C, D, E, and F for 
hexadecimal constants, there is no reason to outlaw bases lower than 16, 
but higher bases would have noticable effects even if a user never 
expected to use based numbers.