alt Hacker NewsThere is no right or wrong, only what works and what does not.
Obviously the author never fixed 10 y.o. bugs at 0430 hrs in a room full of people watching his every finger. In moments like that, the programmer wants to work with the most boring, straightforward code.
Artistry contests is sometging else. I like doing this (iteration [0..9] backwards):
size_t i = 9;
for ( ; i < 10; i -- ) ...
The fact that such a trivial need require to go into such an esoteric details speak more about the qualities of C than the author proposal actually.
And the kind of situation you describe sure can happen, but if it's more than once in a team life time, there are organizational issues at stake which are far more of a concern than any accumulation of code artistry pushed border line with occultism.