There's no double quote involved, you saying that implied you didn't know how the statement worked (regardless of whether you actually understood it or not), so

There's no double quote involved, you saying that implied you didn't know how the statement worked (regardless of whether you actually understood it or not), so their reply was valid. I feel like this whole avenue doesn't fit your overall point. You can certainly create a string in C without using quotes, and you can also write heavily obfuscated code that would be difficult to understand and look very strange.