But it also gets more confusing as they will also interpret number is each others bases if that is indicated by a prefix in their arguments:

print hex '0' . '175';;
373
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But 175 octal is 125 decimal. I would say the confusing thing may be that oct does interpret a number as hex when prefixed by '0x', but hex doesn't interpret a number as octal when it's prefixed by 0(?!x). Now, I wouldn't want hex to do so, as hex bitfields are often fixed length, and will have leading 0s.