I love this, but it's an awful lot of complexity to print '9' to stdout. The first time I ran it through a python interpreter, I thought I made a mistake.
>Many students of mathematics are familiar with Gödel numbering members of a set; Church encoding is an equivalent operation defined on lambda abstractions instead of natural numbers.
Utter clarity. Or, at least as clear as the python code the original post points to :-)
It will make your life better.
http://books.google.com/books?id=aFcsnUEewLkC&dq=godel+e...
I had a buddy of mine in highschool who used to bring that book with him every time we took LSD. Of course, he's now got his Ph.D. in physics from Purdue.