There are no special line-continuation rules for EQUEL/BASIC. EQUEL statements can be broken between words and continued on any number of subsequent lines. An exception to this rule is that you cannot continue a statement between two words that are reserved when they appear together, such as declare cursor. For a list of double keywords, see the QUEL Reference Guide. Each continuation line must be started with ## characters. Blank lines are permitted between continuation lines. The BASIC line continuation symbol (&), cannot be used with EQUEL lines.

If you want to continue a character-string constant across two lines, end the first line with a backslash character (\), and continue the string at the beginning of the next line. In this case, do not place ## characters at the beginning of the continuation lines.

For examples of string continuation, see String Literals.

The BASIC code generated by the EQUEL preprocessor will follow the BASIC rules for continuing statements. Host code should, of course, follow the BASIC rules for line continuation. For example: