This is exactly the point I'm making; if we must ascribe agency at all (I'm thinking that's a category error here, but human thought is fuzzy and I'll roll with

This is exactly the point I'm making; if we must ascribe agency at all (I'm thinking that's a category error here, but human thought is fuzzy and I'll roll with it for now), it would belong to the "==". Don't read it as English at all; read it natively. There is a reason we call these programming languages, no joke, no pun. "But I do wonder if you’d be equally happy if I went through your codebase and replaced every for loop condition from i < length to length > i..." You'd have a hard time of it; I'm a vigorous believer in doing whatever you can in the language you're in to avoid the old 3-element-style C-style for loops in favor of "for ... in ..." or local equivalent. I'm pretty sure you'd get single digit hits for C-style for loops with multiple clauses in the condition.