Base change notation

[Marc LeBrun]

 >=franktaw at netscape.net
 > Apparently, nobody but Marc and myself cares about this.  At 
least, nobody else has responded.
 > Anybody?

Frank (& Phanatiques)

I've had a couple of interesting private responses which asked 
questions or otherwise touched on the issues but nothing that 
decisively advocated any position one way or the other.

Your arguments for a different notation certainly sound plausible and 
considered--I for one am seriously entertaining the ideas you proposed.

Unfortunately I haven't had time to really give the subject as much 
further thought as I'd like, and probably won't for a while.

However I certainly don't want to be a bottleneck to progress!  If 
you or someone feels a sufficient urgency to change things, I won't 
cry about it (and nothing's stopping me from continuing to use 
whatever notations I want privately, anyway).

The practical issue is of course that a change requires that some 
number of existing OEIS entries be modified, as well as an 
explanation of the adopted notation be added somewhere (hopefully in 
a better place than in the comments on A000695!<;-)

If the OEIS *does* decide to adopt a new notation along the proposed 
lines, I was thinking I'd suggest considering the following tweaks:

1. Use underscore _ to denote subscripting, and adopt it to denote 
static bases as well, eg 11_2 = 3, etc.

2. Use parens () instead of the more esoteric braces {} which are 
harder to type and easier to misread.

3. To reduce clutter and aid parsing and searching, consistently drop 
unneeded parens; otherwise use them for clarity in the usual way, eg 
11_2 instead of 11_(2), n_2->4 for A000695, n_2->(x+1) etc.

And lastly, it might be good to at least consider alternatives to the 
arrow ->.  I personally think -> looks great, but a single character 
such as semicolon ; would be easier to type reliably, and angle 
brackets can be a slight headache for HTML.

Beyond this I'm afraid I can't offer much to help further the 
discussion at this time.

Regards,
   --Marc