[pyre]

Semantics. Are you decrementing the counter by a positive number, or incrementing it by a negative number?

[xenophanes]

Yeah that's the point. Sometimes semantics distinctions matter to the law. So can you just decrement by a negative number to get around it, legally?

[nobody314159]

Semantics especially matter in patents. There is a famous historical case where a patent specified a horizontal beam - since you can never have a perfect horizontal beam in a real machine everyone was free to break it.

It's why every second word in a patent is "substantially"

[binarymax]

I would interpret the 'increment' in the claim to mean increase (by a positive amount). The proposed workaround would start at the end and decrease the counter.