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> turns out JS was implicitly casting my string value to octal

How exactly? I'm really curious. AFAIK it's pretty hard for a JS string to be casted into anything (pretty easy the other way around though).

I guess maybe parseInt can do that, but that's neither casting not implicit.

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Looks like it's been fixed in ES5. From memory I was performing an operation on a html color string and if you clicked a color with a certain prefix it would crash.

I could easily reproduce the bug but it took me forever to work out why JS was choking. I think I added in some ridiculous string padding to prevent the auto casting.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547836/why-doesnt-an-oc...

> Looks like it's been fixed in ES5

That was published 9 years ago.

Presumably by calling parseInt('010') which used to detect zero leading strings as octal.

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