With such a brief comment, it's hard to know which is why I said "probably intending". Only one person knows. ;) Maybe he did think iterators cost more.
You are right I did misread his 1..50 as 0..50 {after looking at the first version of the ggibson Nim code, not the 2nd where he confusingly switched to 1..50 not paralleling the C as well, but correcting his amount-of-work mismatch}.