An undergraduate mathematics professor of mine liked to use the word coding to refer to any act of transforming concepts into a more precise and machine readabl

An undergraduate mathematics professor of mine liked to use the word coding to refer to any act of transforming concepts into a more precise and machine readable form. Not just writing what you want a computer to do in a programming language, but also encoding data. The word "encode" should make this clear: we are turning something into code. Right afterwards, he drew some binary trees on a blackboard and asked us to come up with a coding scheme to turn these differently shaped binary trees into natural numbers. That means defining an injective function from the set of binary trees to the set of natural numbers. Coding is too ambiguous a word and I don't really use it much.