I'm surprised a bit by the "Translation Steps" part at the end. I assumed much of the steps listed happened during parsing, such as processing escape character

I'm surprised a bit by the "Translation Steps" part at the end. I assumed much of the steps listed happened during parsing, such as processing escape characters and converting newlines, but those are done beforehand. Perhaps it is because C uses a preprocessor and some macros would not be possible if all the steps were performed while parsing?