In Olaoluwa Osuntokun's recent protocol proposal they were using a
mod in an inner loop. I wanted to suggest a normative protocol
change to use the trick we use here, but to find an explanation
of it I had to dig up the PR on github. After I posted about it
several other developers commented that it was very interesting
and they were unaware of it.
I think ideally the code should be self documenting and help
educate other contributors about non-obvious techniques that
we use. So I've written a description of the technique with
citations for future reference.