The point is to ask "who" encoded that byte as the value of 10. If you're writing a parser and you parse a newline as the escape sequence `\n`, then where did t

The point is to ask "who" encoded that byte as the value of 10. If you're writing a parser and you parse a newline as the escape sequence `\n`, then where did the value 10 come from? If you instead parse a newline as the integer literal `10`, then where does the actual binary value 1010 come from? The ultimate point of this exercise is to alter your perception of what a compiler is (in the same way as the famous Reflections On Trusting Trust presentation). Which is to say: your compiler is not something that outputs your program; your compiler is also input to your program. And as a program itself, your compiler's compiler was an input to your compiler, which makes it transitively an input to your program, and the same is true of your compiler's compiler's compiler, and your compiler's compiler's compiler's compiler, and your compiler's compiler's compiler's compiler's compiler, and...