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2 Lexical and syntactic conventions

As m4 reads its input, it separates it into tokens. A token is either a name, a quoted string, or any single character, that is not a part of either a name or a string. Input to m4 can also contain comments. GNU m4 does not yet understand locales; all operations are byte-oriented rather than character-oriented. However, m4 is eight-bit clean, so you can use non-ascii characters in quoted strings (see Changequote), comments (see Changecom), and macro names (see Indir), with the exception of the nul character (the zero byte `'\0'').