Ed Murphy wrote: >I'm thinking "SHALL, unless e reasonably believes that assigning a >smaller number might be invalid".
Too tight. If a number assignment has been incorporated into persistent documents, such as a published ruleset, I shouldn't have to reuse it if the entity numbered turns out not to have existed. I have an idea for preventing the use of really colossal numbers: require that the ID number being assigned be stated explicitly as a decimal literal in the assigning announcement. No chained arrow notation for us. -zefram