The comparison operator is not actually mutating the list, which would not be allowed in C++ either. Instead it is dynamically generating the < comparison operator for the elements in the list based on the order for which elements it is evaluated. The order for two elements remains fixed once examined and in the end it always ends up with a valid totally ordered comparison operator. The only thing required for this to work is that the comparison operator can have mutable state and that the same shared state is used for all comparisons in the sorting algorithm (asided from thread-safety so you'd need adjustments for a parallel sort).
