Maybe it's just worse when written. The period at the end of the sentence makes it hard to see how it could be misunderstood.

To your point though, not sure if I'm aware of any programming language that would continue a statement with a following if block. Far more likely that it would fail due to lack of an element to apply the 6 to rather than having a pointer to the previous object, or he would try getting what ever the literal version of a 6 would be, or maybe some slang version.