what character is a physical newline

[Aryeh M. Friedman]

Just incase you guys are curious  the reason for  doing the parser from 
scratch is  it is designed to lex/parse families of languages not just a 
single lang for example (there is very large overlap between 
c/c++/java/c#/etc. as there is in the tag langs like XML/HTML)... also 
generators produce unreadable code (and impossible to hand modify if 
you're not quite happy with the generated code) thus I refer to the 
design as a heiractical recursive decent parser (i.e. it lexs/parses the 
commonalties of a family [or set of families {all ascii vs, unicode 
langs for example are a set of families} before it attempts to handle 
the actual lang [or family in the case of set of families]).