The delimiter can be from zero to 16 characters long and may contain any member of the basic source character set except whitespace characters, parentheses, or backslash.
The minister received backslash from the agitating legislators who asked him to just reply to their questions as it is their right and government is liable to answer them.
Most frequently, ending a line with a backslash (immediately followed by a newline) results in the line being "continued" the following line is "joined" to the previous line.
