What does backslash really escape?It's used as escaping character.  But I always wonder what's escaping?I know \n is a new line character. But what in it is escaping? Why is it called like that?
What does backslash \ escape character really escape?
programming languages
The backslash is used as a marker character to tell the compiler/interpreter that the next character has some special meaning. What that next character means is up to the implementation. For example C-style languages use \n to mean newline and \t to mean tab.The use of the word escape really means to temporarily escape out of parsing the text and into a another mode where the subsequent character is treated differently.