VMS Help FORTRAN, Compatibility Features, Octal Notation  *Conan The Librarian (sorry for the slow response - running on an old VAX)

  Octal forms of integer constants allow compatibility with PDP-11
  FORTRAN.  Statement format:

     "nn

     nn  Is a string of digits in the range 0 to 7 (for
         example "107).

  Integer constants in octal form have integer data type and are
  treated as integers.