[seqfan] Re: Offsets of Large Integers Decomposed into Decimal Digits

[Hans Havermann]

On Jun 15, 2014, at 8:43 PM, Neil Sloane <njasloane at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Hans, I understand your point...

I'm not sure that you do. All of your examples are non-integers. I don't have a problem with the offsets of those. Integers are constants of a different kind: They can be decomposed in two ways: left-to-right and right-to-left. Suppose someone wanted to contribute the decimal digits of a large number like 9^9^9^9^9. They couldn't do it left-to-right because we can't calculate the first few digits of that expansion. But we can describe this number right-to-left: the units digit, the tens digit, the hundreds digit, etc. Now, think about this sequence. It's not a constant. It doesn't end in a decimal point. It's just a finite list of digits with offset 1. Why should the left-to-right description of a large integer be seen as fundamentally different than the right-to-left description?