I realize that there’s not much call for using octal literals these days (and Swift even removed them, only the sequence \0 is allowed in string literals, any following digit is taken to be a separate character), but if they are going to be in the language, they should be done in as sane a way as possible. (They made a lot of sense back on the 18 and 36 bit machines that I used back at MIT in the early 80’s, i.e. Dec-10, Dec-20, and Lisp Machines, with 9-bit bytes, but not so much these days!)