Strange indeed.
No idea and this should be clarified.
By the way what is the interpretation of the radix in presence of  
exponent. Does it mean that exponent is also interpreted
following the radix specification.

Stef

>> 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
>
>