Course-of-values Recursion - Application To Primitive Recursive Functions

Application To Primitive Recursive Functions

In the context of primitive recursive functions, it is convenient to have a means to represent finite sequences of natural numbers as single natural numbers. One such method, Gödel's encoding, represents a sequence as

,

where pi represent the ith prime. It can be shown that, with this representation, the ordinary operations on sequences are all primitive recursive. These operations include

  • Determining the length of a sequence,
  • Extracting an element from a sequence given its index,
  • Concatenating two sequences.

Using this representation of sequences, it can be seen that if h(m) is primitive recursive then the function

.

is also primitive recursive.

When the natural numbers are taken to begin with zero, the sequence is instead represented as

,

which makes it possible to distinguish the codes for the sequences and .

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