C needs BCD (ANSI People: Please Listen)

[Brandon Allbery]

Strange how net subjects hit you in unexpected places.  Just after reading
the request for C BCD, I was trying to compile a program which had somehow
become garbled.  One set of error messages it produced was:

... newline in BCD constant
... BCD constant too long
... gcos BCD constant illegal

The source code?

				offset -=`BLKSIZE;

(I *said* the code was garbled.)  I get the feeling MS foisted yet *another*
undocumented feature on us.  The question is, is this one like the IOCTL
calls for multiplex files and for the Berkeley `NTTY' discipline (i.e.
they're there but don't do a (@) thing)?  And why `gcos'???  This is
supposed to be *Microsoft* :-)

--bsa