This is becoming very philosophical.
It's not philosophy; it's hard practical advice about effective
techniques for asking questions.
My question to the group was about Y. I obtained answers about Y.
To question whether or not I am able to solve X is to question my
ability and not to answer my question.
You shouldn't be thin-skinned about that. If you need to ask any
question at all, that implies that there's some things you don't know
about the topic of your question. There's nothing unusual about that, we
all have gaps in our knowledge, just gaps of different sizes and in
different locations. The more elementary the question, the more it
implies that you don't know. This particular question implied a fairly
basic misunderstanding about how functions worked, justifying a
suspicion that there's a fair bit you don't know about C.
It's quite common for people to ask the wrong question; questioning them
to determine what the right question should have been is more helpful
than answering the wrong question that they asked. The particular
question you asked was so bizarre as to strongly justify a suspicion
that this might be one of those cases.
In particular, there's one key disadvantage to your approach that I
didn't address in my earlier comments. What if Y did "solve" your
problem, but was far from being the best solution? I've frequently seen
questions about extremely complicated and elaborate "solutions", that
could, when the questions had been answered, do what they were intended
to do, but were extremely unlikely to be the best solution to whatever
the real problem was.
I've found that the people who ask these questions are almost never
willing to describe the real problem that they're trying to solve, which
makes it difficult to prove that they asked the wrong question. I
suspect that they're embarrassed about something that they would have to
explain - perhaps it's something illegal, or maybe just that they don't
want people to see how bad their coding skills are. A few have claimed
that they had security issues to worry about, which sounds fairly
legitimate - but almost any code that poses security issues can be
rewritten to present the same coding problem without violating security.
Generalities are certainly nice things to state. And I am not up to
date on how others discuss their problems. So I apologize for my
inappropriate behaviour on this newsgroup.
It's not inappropriate behavior; it's an unproductive approach to asking
for help.