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 treats
these lines as one long line, and ignores the final \ character. This
feature only works when the \ character is the last one on the line (only a
physical newline may follow).

When the line bf(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:
    COMMENT(NOTE: KEEP THE BLANK TRAILING `Grandpa and\ ')\
        verb(
    Grandpa and\ 
    grandma are sitting on the sofa.
        )
    Due to the occurrence of the \ character in the sequence tt(and\), YODL
combines the lines to
        verb(
    Grandpa andgrandma are sitting on the sofa.
        )
    Note that the spaces before tt(grandma) are ignored, since this is the
second line following a \ character.

    If you bf(do) want one or more spaces while joining lines with \, put the
spaces bf(before) the \ character.
    nl()
    Summarizing:
    itemization(
    it() A Line ending in a backslash character is merged with the next
line. 
    it() This only happens if the \ character is the bf(last) character of the 
line, no spaces may appear behind the \.
    it() 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 bf(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 tt(CHAR(C)HAR(\)) or tt(CHAR(C)HAR(92))
(see section ref(CHAR) for the tt(CHAR) macro).

    When YODL processes input files, and the white-space level exceeds zero
(see section ref(INCWSLEVEL)), then all lines are processed as if they
terminated by a \. This behavior was implemented first with YODL version
2.00. It can be suppressed using YODL's tt(-k) flag.
