Indeed. I made that observation when I bumped into Simon in the pub this evening.

There is just one place I can think of where backslash-newline is nonetheless needed: splitting a #include filename across multiple lines. Why doesn't the preprocessor concatenate all strings that follow the #include directive to make the filename? I concluded some hysterical raisins might be involved. (ISTR encountering a compiler once upon a time that had a non-standard optional second parameter.)