Backslash-newline escape as a line continuation rather than a newline?

[M Joonas Pihlaja <jpihlaja@...>]

Hey,

In Lua 5.2 string literals could the backslash-newline escape code 
swallow the newline character rather than embedding it into the 
string?  This would be similar to C's continuation lines.

The motivation for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way of having 
really long string literals in a Lua source file split across multiple 
lines without extra runtime overhead.  As far as I can tell, I either 
have to use shorter pieces and concatenate them at runtime, or add 
extra newlines to the string and remove them at runtime.

Cheers,

Joonas