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in reply to Re^2: A philosophical pondering concerning hexes
in thread A philosophical pondering concerning hexes

My guess is that he means something like:
$ perl -wle 'print oct 108' Illegal octal digit '8' ignored at -e line 1. 8
To me, this is just what's Perl is about; regardless of what you throw at it, it does it utter best to make something out of it, and it issues a warning there's something odd about the input. Although in this case, it isn't just Perl that does so - the C functions strtol, and atoi and friends also consume initial portions of a string, stopping at the first character that isn't valid.

Abigail