[contingencies]

Heh! You wouldn't need to check the code to validate the execution flow unless you're on a first-world network and so used to them that latency becomes unnoticed!

In terms of comprehension for the record I would recommend instead of the source the explanation at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute

For awhile it used to be that people would write their own traceroute implementation as a rite of passage.

As a joke, back in the 1990s, Julian Assange took it one step further and used to spoof responses to traceroutes in order send a fake route back to the querying node, indicating that his systems were somehow affiliated with important government or military entities. Excellent sense of humor :)