> To escape a character means to do something (typically, to
> prefix it with \ in C-family languages) to allow the
> character to be used literally but without its normal parser
> treatment. So \ before a newline in a shell script is an
> escaped character.
Kernighan and Ritchie don't use "escape" as a verb, but they do refer to
constructs such as "\n" and "\b" as "escape sequences". So it seems fairly
natural that people should use the verb "escape [a character]" to mean
"represent [a character] by means of an escape sequence". Representing tab
by "\t" doesn't seem very different from representing tab by "	", so
it's natural that the same verb should be used for that too.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
