Continuation Lines

Any sentence, entry, clause, or phrase that requires more than one line can be continued in Area B of the next line that is neither a comment line nor a blank line. The line being continued is a continued line; the succeeding lines are continuation lines. Area A of a continuation line must be blank, though the indicator area must contain a hyphen. If there is no hyphen the last character of the preceding line is assumed to be followed by a space.

If there is a hyphen in the indicator area of a line, the first nonblank character of this continuation line immediately follows the last nonblank character of the continued line without an intervening space.

If the continued line contains a nonnumeric literal without a closing quotation mark, all spaces at the end of the continued line (through column 72) are considered to be part of the literal. The continuation line must contain a hyphen in the indicator area, and the first nonblank character must be a quotation mark. The continuation of the literal begins with the character immediately following the quotation mark. If the last character of a continued line is a single quotation mark in column 72, the first two nonblank characters in the continuation line must be two quotes to denote a single quote as part of the nonnumeric literal.

For the pseudo-text delimiter separator (==), the two characters that make up the separator must occupy the same line.