Well he said "How would you do this in C?", which could be interpretted as a rhetorical means of asserting the claim that it couldn't be done (particularly if you take his quote in context). Regardless of whether you think that he was asserting it's impossibility or just claiming that it was ridiculously hard, his statement was clearly rhetoric.

I was just answering rhetoric with rhetoric. Specifically with hyperbole. I know he wasn't claiming that it couldn't be done at all... but his claim was ridiculous none the less. The worst thing is that he picked a particularly silly example, as it could be done in a very small and simple C program.

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