[mturmon]

If you start with code golf, as you did, then this is where you end up. The only way to win is not to play?

[38]

mine is just normal idiomatic Go code. thats not true of the C code.

[inferiorhuman]

It might be ugly, but that is idiomatic C code. C didn't even have boolean types until C99, and even then it's an "extension" of an integer type.

You could argue about the loop itself, after all K&R specified "for(;;)", but the other commonly used (ergo idiomatic) infinite loops use precisely the same number of lines. "while(1)" is a perfectly idiomatic manner to create an infinite loop.

Likewise a void return type for main was entirely legal until C99. The BSD yes(1) I've laying around only prints the first argument, so flag parsing? What flag parsing?

Yes in nine lines of C inclusive of preprocessor macro invocations and white space.

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    const char *phrase = argc > 1 ? argv[1] : "y";
    while (1) {
      printf("%s\n", phrase);
    }
    return 0;
  }

[38]

I don't see proper flag parsing, I see an argv hack.

[inferiorhuman]

There are no flags in yes(1) ergo there's no need for "flag parsing". yes(1) takes one optional string as input, and that's exactly what argv provides. I'm not sure what you think "flag parsing" is bringing to the table here, but checking the array of command line parameters and accessing an element is pretty far from a hack.

If it's more comfortable you can also declare argv as an array of character arrays e.g. char *[], but that won't change the line count.

[38]

It's a lose for C either way. Either it cant parse flags, or we remove that requirement, and my code goes from 9 lines to 6.

[rascul]

The requirement to parse flags is your own. You can remove it from your go program. You only need to parse one string, if it exists.

[rcr]

Who cares though? We get it, you prefer golang, congrats?