[invincing]

I think it's important to know when a theoretical framework can be applied to the full extent and when the real-life situation is actually a subset that behaves differently.

In this case the problem is solvable within the subset presented by the JavaScript language, but there are other cases where applying theory directly to real life constructs without considering the differences can lead to buggy code. For instance floating point numbers come to mind immediately.

I agree that discussions like this are sidetracking the whole point of a good article, but in order to avoid that, I'd use pseudo-code instead of a real language for presenting concepts like this.