Historical question about backquote (`)

[David Adrien Tanguay]

In article <874 at jonlab.UUCP> jon at 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