Fun post! Very happy to see a 20-something year old find and fix bugs in an X11 wm from before they were born. Gives me hope.
There was some kind of editing snafu though, the loop header in the big (first) code block reads:
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++, nuke_count++)
But the references to it in the text, and updated versions in the patches, show it as just for (;;)
That was confusing me a bit.
In the article just before that code:
The loop is of paticular interest to us. Abridged: