Hm. Backslash seems to be used for something other than escaping. Not a good sign.
From the tutorial[1]:
In ANI, \ means "latch". Basically, a latch is a place where you can "hold on to" an object of the specified type. A latch is like a box that you can put things in to, take things out of, and peek at what's inside.
If it weren't for the long-running convention of using backslashes as escape characters, postfix backslash would make some kind of sense, at least visually.
Forward slashes are for prefixes, backward slashes are for postfixes. Nice parallel there :)
Aside from breaking the escaping convention, slashes in code give the page an unfortunate swirly quality. It seems like line other parallel or perpendicular can make the line of the page look it is at a different angle.
From the tutorial[1]:
In ANI, \ means "latch". Basically, a latch is a place where you can "hold on to" an object of the specified type. A latch is like a box that you can put things in to, take things out of, and peek at what's inside.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/anic/wiki/Tutorial