Decimals and other numbers

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Devin Jeanpierre writes:

[...]

> domain of the natural numbers.  Knuth says that thought of
> combinatorially on the naturals, x**y counts the number of mappings
> from a set of x values to a set of y values.

It's the other way around, of course: from a set of y values to a set
of x values.

Which reminds me of a question that once made me smile, even laugh,
and still does: 2**3 is almost 3**2 but not quite - what gives?

> Clearly there's only one mapping from the empty set to itself: the

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