Subject: Re: TSA Response serialNumber Field

From: Eric Norman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 12:16:06 -0500 (CDT)

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Peter Sylvester wrote:

> "Monotonically increasing" means that a sequence is
> monotonical, thus either always non-decreasing or non-increasing,
> and increasing selects one of the possibilities. "Strictly"
> means that you never have two numbers twice.

For what it's worth, a math major and someone who considers himself
a mathematician will chime in and point out the the above is
essentially correct.  In particular, "monotonic" DOES NOT imply
"increase by one".

And now, to tell you more than you wanted to know, the word
"monotonic" is actually an adjective that is applied to functions.
A function F is call monotonic if it is order preserving; that
means that if x <= y, then then F(x) <= F(y).

I return you now to your regular discussion about the real issues.

Eric Norman

	"Congress shall make no law restricting the size of integers
	that may be multiplied together, or the number of times that
	an integer may be multiplied by itself, or the modulus by
	which an integer may be reduced".

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From: Stephen Kent <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 17:38:25 -0400

Eric,

Whoops, you're right.  No requirement for the sequence to increment 
by 1 each time.  Of course, the benefits I cited for such an 
increment are lost in the more general case.

Steve