Q: Why are there back slashes \ at the end of the line in the grammar?
A: C will ignore a combination of a newline followed by \, which lets you format long strings more nicely. An example:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
/* If you count the spaces here and in the resulting output, there are
* 11. The \ and the newline are dropped. */
printf("this is line one \
and this is line two\n");
return 0;
}
this is line one and this is line two
