(changing title to fit thrust of discussion better)

[e, q, d as exponents]
>> Why??? This seems completely superfluous and causes actual harm if  
>> you happen to misspell a hex constant.
> 
> Well, the obvious choice is e which still would be a hex digit. The  
> Blue Book only has e, btw.
> 
> I had a conversation with Dan once about Smalltalk's syntax for  literal 
> numbers and he was quite proud of the purely syntactical  rules enabled 
> by distinguishing upper and lower case.

That's not my point, which is: Why do we need "d" and "q" *in addition* 
to "e"? Note that this is a recent addition - it has been added to 3.8 
with update 6482NumberReadFromFixes-2-dtl which claims that

	"These changes correct several problems with parsing of numbers from 
strings and streams. The problems are demonstrated by NumberParsingTest 
and ScaledDecimalTest (provided in separate change sets; the latter is 
already included in the Squeak 3.9 image)."

Unfortunately, the only thing that relates to the behavior in question 
are two tests which "confirm" that behavior. So again: Why "d" and "q"? 
What do we need that for?

Cheers,
   - Andreas