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:
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.
Please send Yodl questions and comments to yodl@icce.rug.nl.
Please send comments on these web pages to (address unknown)
Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.