Hello *, Section 2.6. of the Haskell report says: A string may include a "gap"---two backslants enclosing white characters---which is ignored. This allows one to write long strings on more than one line by writing a backslant at the end of one line and at the start of the next. For example, "Here is a backslant \\ as well as \137, \ \a numeric escape character, and \^X, a control character." ghc-5.02.2 cannot parse string gaps. It accepts \ at the end of a line but not at the beginning of the following line. Michael