I'm afraid I don't understand you.

• C is not Perl! That is right. This was a silly bit of code. No harm done.
• There is <>! Right.
• No @ARGV is opened for getchar()! Right. I never actually read the file they put at the command-line. There's no reason to.
• getchar() actually reads from STDIN! That is correct too! I read from the terminal if the user has piped a file to me, or if there are no arguments.
• japhy doesn't program in C very much. That is not wholly true. I don't program in C nearly as much as I use Perl. However, I've been doing more C-work since I started patching Perl.
• BTW the syntax is good. Thanks to my Perl experience, my C code is often sharp and concise.

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker