I am sometimes heard someone claims that in the computing world we need the octal numeric system. As I haven't seen any confirmation IRL, I just ignored it, for me it is pretty common to hear a nonsense. But today I drew attention that the strace utility sometimes in the output uses the octal system, e.g.:
recv(3, "\22\4\5\22\22\4\207ZT\311\377\377\22\5\22\4\5\377\377\1\0\1\0%L\22\5\22\4\5oa"..., 255, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 54
So I decide to ask the question: why someone could need it? As an example, I can shortly argue why we need another common numeric systems:
Binary: to have a comfortable computing with a bits, as those have only two values.
Hexadecimal: as the F(15 in decimal) is just the half of a byte, and it is comfortable to represent a "full" byte with FF. And the binary one, of course, is too cumbersome for a big values.
Decimal: as this is native numeric system for a humans.
Octal: Hm... Have no idea.
Each Octal represents 3 binary digits and also it works in counts of eight, inputs and outputs were in counts of eight, a byte at a time.convenient way of converting large binary numbers into more compact and smaller groups. However, these days the octal numbering system is used less frequently than the more popular hexadecimal numbering system and has almost disappeared as a digital base number system.