Mysteriously added backslashes

Hi,
when working on my local development (xampp, joomla 2.5, php 5.3), all fields with php code add a slash prior to quotation mark, which makes code like

return date('Y-m-d');

look as

return date(\'Y-m-d\');

causing of course disfunction and errors – and with each saving adding more and more backslashes, so that I even found some

return date(\\\\\\\'Y-m-d\\\\\\\');

.
In the live environment (joomla 2.5, php 5.4) this doesn't happen. Is that a bug which has to do with php version or what else might cause that? Thankful for any comment,
Herbert

I just saw this for a quick second and it I got a message saying something about magic quotes then I removed them and it was all good, it was on hostgator hosting