Why are leading zeroes used to represent octal numbers?

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All modern languages import this convention from C, which imported it from B, which imported it from BCPL.

Except BCPL used #1234 for octal and #x1234 for hexadecimal. B has departed from this convention because # was an unary operator in B (integer to floating point conversion), so #1234 could not be used, and # as a base indicator was replaced with 0.

The designers of B tried to make the syntax very compact. I guess this is the reason they did not use a two-character prefix.

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