Binary and octal literals not currently supported by lua

[Tomas Mudrunka <mudrunka@...>]

Hello,
lua recently received native bitwise operators:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/BitwiseOperators

But there is no way to enter binary literals. I would find such feature 
to be quite helpful addition to these new bitwise operations. While i 
understand that one can easily precalculate the literals before entering 
into the code, sometimes it can be useful when programming language does 
this to me, so that bit-fiddling code is easier to read, modify and 
debug.
Can you please consider adding such feature? eg.:

> 42 -- decimal works
42

> 0x2A -- hexadecimal works
42

> 0b00101010 -- binary fails
stdin:1: malformed number near '0b00101010'

> 0o52 -- octal fails
stdin:1: malformed number near '0o'

Octal would be nice, but not strictly neccessary. I mostly use it when 
working with file permission modes and i can live without it just fine. 
But handling binary on the other hand is daily task for me.

As a workaround i've written small lua function to handle this for me, 
but it seems as a quite inneficient and probably very wrong solution. So 
i would strongly prefer the binary notation to be part of lua.

-- Create number from string containing binary notation (up to 63b)
-- Any character other than 0 or 1 will get ignored
-- eg.: b('00101010') will get you 42
function b(str)
	if type(vals) ~= "string" then
		str = tostring(str)
	end
	local n = 0;
	for c in str:gmatch"." do
		if c=='0' then; n =  n << 1; end;
		if c=='1' then; n = (n << 1) | 1; end;
	end
	return n;
end


Thanks for considering this.

--
S pozdravem
Best regards
     Tomáš Mudruňka - SPOJE.NET s.r.o.