printf("Some message¥n");

DOS and Win9x were particularly disgusting: C:¥DIR¥SUBDIR¥README.TXT

It's regarded more as a necessary evil than anything else. Any language featuring it prominently will be unlikely to achieve much popularity in Japan.

The reason why that works is that it is not that the Japanese keyboard layout that lacks the backslash, but the Japanese character set. See (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.as... for details)

Also, in C, you can just type ??/ instead of backslash.

So, as far as ANI is concerned, you could just do latch¥ - no problem ;-) though ugly.

What does Ruby do?