Thanks for the thoughtful replies. Answers to questions:
Many people asked for the context. This is for college students using what they already know about the order of arithmetic operations to start analyzing the structure of code. In the activity, they visual code structures using these kind of diagrams. The important thing here is thus not just subtraction; it’s this way of visualizing the relationships — and there already is a sight-centeric word, “visualize!” But I suspect a blind reader could also use these spatial relationships as a learning tool…if there were a good way of conveying the spatial relationships.