When you see this line of code in your source window, how does your brain read it?
My brain says “There’s a hex number, with a couple of 1’s in it.”
Guess what? WRONG. It has one ‘1’. The end character is a secret hidden lowercase “L”. Thanks, Microsoft. Lucida console has literally a one pixel difference between it’s ‘1’ and ‘l’, which is fairly typical. These things are speckled all over mmsystem.h. Personally I never use ‘L’ at the end of a hex digit, and if I was feeling clinically insane enough to do it, I’d at least use a capital ‘L’.
caustik's blog 
LOL!
yeah… on the computer it should be easy to percieve the differences but apparently Lucida makes it nearly impossible… and i suppose it isnt different colors to highlight the difference between numbers and letters as well, to make it even harder…
when writing by hand (with pencil) i also find it difficult to make 1’s and l’s look different…
the same issue with O’s and 0’s 🙂
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of course, the “l” does have its use there, so you can’t just leave it out (you can in most cases, but that’s hardly a rule)
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I have yet to find a case where the ‘l’ is needed. I would be interested to see an example case.
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I agree, it’s VERY rarely needed, but the functionality is there. There’s no real use for it in a strongly typed environment I guess
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The font is Courier New not Lucida Console.
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