To make the typing of input easier, Yodl allows you to end a line with a backslash character \ and to continue it on the next line. That way you can split long lines to fit your screen. When processing its input, Yodl will treat these lines as one long line, and will of course ignore the \ character. This feature only works when the \ character is the last one on the line (no spaces may follow). When the line following the one with the \ character has leading spaces, then these are omitted. This allows you to `indent' a file as you wish, while the space characters of the indentation are ignored by the yodl program. A trivial example is the following:
Grampa and\ 
    grandma are sitting on the sofa.

Due to the occurrence of the \ character in the sequence and\, Yodl will combine the lines into

Grampa andgrandma are sitting on the sofa.

Note that the spaces before grandma are ignored, since this is the second line following a \ character.

If you do want one or more spaces while joining lines with \, put the spaces before the \ character.

Summarized:

  • A Line that ends in a backslash character is merged with the following line.

  • This only occurs if the \ character is the last character of the line, no spaces may occur after the character.

  • When merging lines, Yodl ignores leading spaces of the second line.

  • The question is of course, how do you accomplish that a line really ends with a \, when you do not want Yodl to merge it with the following line? In such a case, type a space character following your \: Yodl won't combine the lines. Or set the \ character as CHAR(\) or CHAR(92) (see section ?? for the CHAR macro). In my opinion, the ease of line continuation in Yodl files outweighs the extra necessary actions to typeset a real \ character at the end of a line.


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    Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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