Why would you assume that this is a joke? C (particularly back when this was written) was a low level language. You could not simply use an external iterator -

Why would you assume that this is a joke? C (particularly back when this was written) was a low level language. You could not simply use an external iterator - they didn't exist. And if you try to roll your own, you'll wind up dealing with a lot of complications around resource management in a language which lacks basic memory management. But the proof is in the pudding. Back then it was common to want to telnet into a Unix machine from Windows. And the only two solutions that worked well enough to consider were installing Cygwin, or installing PuTTY. Cygwin was better if you needed a Unix environment on your Windows machine. Otherwise PuTTY was your answer. As the article comments, PuTTY was written with this technique. When you've solved a problem that a lot of people had, and your solution is widely acknowledged as the best one out there, people get interested in how you think it should be solved. Which is why this article interested me when I first saw in many years ago on Slashdot. So absolutely not a joke.