Why is the Putback initialized to '\n'?

[Currygm]

Excuse me, I' m a freshman studying computer science. I'm trying to follow along this series and this is the first project I have tried. When I was studying the main.c in 01_Scanner, I can't understand why the Putback should be initialized to '\n'. I think about that if it could be initialized to 0 or just a whitespace. I think it doesn't matter.

[Currygm]

Probably doesn't matter but If I remember right its the global variable used to skip the either the first byte or first line when the file is opened, so that it does handle the rest of the lexing properly, so I would assume using \n just reminds you that your skipping the first byte at the beginning. A quick fresh collection of tokens right after.

Why does it skip the first byte or the first line when the file is opened? It doesn't need to be handled?

[DoctorWkt]

I don't think it needs to be \n. It can be zero, but it needs to be initialised by main().
I think I probably copied over from the SubC code :-)