Author here - Apologies, I'll work on making that better. It could perhaps do with an intermediate step where the expression is broken down into a subexpression tree.
Anyway, the problem with using assembly is that it imposes an artificial temporal total ordering on the actions being performed. Under temporal total ordering, the possibility of unsequenced actions disappears, and the message is lost.
>no-one outside of compiler developers has the right vocabulary for descriptions to work
There's nothing here specific to implementing compilers. There are a few uses of standardese and graph theory, but they're relatively basic concepts that are important to familiarize yourself with if you want to use tools like C++ effectively.