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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'').