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(gcc-300.info)Escaped Newlines

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Slightly Looser Rules for Escaped Newlines
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   Recently, the non-traditional preprocessor has relaxed its treatment
of escaped newlines.  Previously, the newline had to immediately follow
a backslash.  The current implementation allows whitespace in the form
of spaces, horizontal and vertical tabs, and form feeds between the
backslash and the subsequent newline.  The preprocessor issues a
warning, but treats it as a valid escaped newline and combines the two
lines to form a single logical line.  This works within comments and
tokens, including multi-line strings, as well as between tokens.
Comments are _not_ treated as whitespace for the purposes of this
relaxation, since they have not yet been replaced with spaces.