I'm a college programming student with two years of programming experience in Java and Python. We've talked about number systems in classes including Binary, Octal, and Hexidecimal. I understand why Binary and Hexidecimal are important in Computing but I don't see any benefits to using Octal numbers. What would be some examples of Octal number use in programming?
Many early computers had 36 bit architectures (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/36-bit) and octal makes a lot more sense for them, as 3 divides into 36 very nicely (12 has a lot of factors). Four also divides but its an odd number.