Yep, you've hit upon (or did you already know it?) one of the many gimmicks for streamlining Gödel's original encoding. (I *think* the variable base trick, which makes parsing a concatenation of encoded symbols computationally easier, is due to Kripke.) To make this slightly more pertinent to the wordsmithing concerns of this list I offer the following: (sorry, it's an attachment but smallish)Attachment: georgeb2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF documentDavid Auerbach Department of Philosophy & Religion Box 8103 NCSU Raleigh, NC 27695-8103 On Feb 14, 2005, at 11:16 AM, cld@xxxxxxxx wrote:You can compute length for a very long series, say n=123456789, using a very large base, say 1234567, without inventing 1234567 unique symbols (because, obviously, it doesn't matter what the symbols are, you're just counting them). Also, again obvious, you can always make length equal to n (the last number in the series) by increasing the base to (at least) n+1.