Okay, let me put it this way. If one wanted to not just die and to attempt to actually deal with not being able to fork more than X children even though Y children were requested, the example would need more changes than just removing the die() and reporting the error. The counts would also need to be moved. So in an example program that's going to be expanded upon and altered, it may be fruitful to track those things in the proper place from the beginning.