Of the handful of languages I just checked, a fair number of them—especially the popular ones—treat integers starting with 0 as octal. Python 2.6, Ruby, PHP, Pe

Of the handful of languages I just checked, a fair number of them—especially the popular ones—treat integers starting with 0 as octal. Python 2.6, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Scala, Java and D all believed that 010 == 8, while GHC, GNU Prolog, GNU Smalltalk, Scheme (Guile and Racket) and Common Lisp all treated it as being equal to 10. Python 3 actively rejects it, because they've changed the octal literal syntax to 0o10 to prevent this from sneaking up on people. Some of the other complaints are valid—for example, I dream of a sensible module system when writing in C, which would alleviate #13—but a lot of the complaints are sort of petty, and I'd argue that this one, being true of many more languages than C, falls directly into the petty bin.