You are of course completely correct. However, I still stand by my pseudocode - I claim that it will give a fairly accurate impression of the basic concept of

You are of course completely correct. However, I still stand by my pseudocode - I claim that it will give a fairly accurate impression of the basic concept of zero-cost access checks to a reader who isn’t familiar with low-level systems programming. (That said, I have updated my comment to make it clear it’s more of a metaphor than a literal description.)