Syntactic sugar poll

[Erik.Johansson]

I have a suggestion for a very small change that seems to arouse strong feelings.

Since I am doing a lot of assembly hacking I often need to use hexadecimal constants. All my debuggers and C compilers write hexadecimal constants as 0xN, but in Erlang I have to write it as 16#N. There are two problems with this, I can not copy and paste hexadecimal numbers between Erlang and other applications, and it looks really ugly. Now, don't get me wrong the general base#number syntax is flexible and useful but would it not be nice to have 0xN as syntactic sugar for 16#N in Erlang. 

What do you think? Would it be nice to have this feature? 
Are there any reasons for not allowing this feature?

I use it in the shell in my system (together with my fixes for printing hexadecimal numbers) but since it is not a part of standard Erlang I can't use it in Erlang code that I write (at least not in portable code ;) which is a shame.

All that is need to get it to work is this little patch:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
lib/stdlib/src/erl_scan.erl
505a506,512
+ scan_after_int([$x|Cs], Ncs, Toks, SPos, CPos) ->
+     case list_to_integer(reverse(Ncs)) of
+       0 ->
+           scan_based_int(Cs, 0, 16, Toks, SPos, CPos);
+       Base ->
+           scan_error({base,Base}, CPos)
+     end;
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Please, support this bill today!

/Erik
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 N. Erik M. Johansson
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