Is there any difference if I remove the '/' from the following statement? intMatrix2 = [[1,1,2,4,1,7,1,7,6,9],\ [1,2,5,3,9,1,1,1,9,1],\ [0,0,5,1,1,1,9,7,7,7]] print intMatrix2 I removed one '\' and it still works. So what is the use of '\'?