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A potential number cannot contain any escape characters. An escape character robs the following character of all syntactic qualities, forcing it to be strictly alphabetic_2 and therefore unsuitable for use in a potential number. For example, all of the following representations are interpreted as symbols, not numbers:
\256 25\64 1.0\E6 |100| 3\.14159 |3/4| 3\/4 5||
In each case, removing the escape character (or characters) would cause the token to be a potential number.