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From: datanguay@watmath.waterloo.edu (David Adrien Tanguay)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Historical question about backquote (`)
Keywords: BCD constant, `, gcos
Message-ID: <1990Nov13.000529.9770@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 90 00:05:29 GMT
References: <874@jonlab.UUCP>
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 23

In article <874@jonlab.UUCP> jon@jonlab.UUCP (Jon H. LaBadie) writes:
#A long time ago I stumbled across some code that had
#backquotes where forward quotes were intended for character
#constants.  I would have expected the error message to
#be something like:
#
#	illegal character "`": line NNN
#
#but to my surprise I got something like:
#
#	illegal BCD constant: line NNN
#
#or
#
#	illegal gcos BCD constant: line NNN

GCOS is an operating system. Its file system (and other aspects) make
heavy use of BCD encodings. The GCOS B compiler used graves to specify
BCD constants, and this was inherited by the GCOS C compiler.
Presumably, the compiler you were using was at some point ported to GCOS
and had the BCD constant extension put in.
-- 
David Tanguay            Software Development Group, University of Waterloo