Dear Vasili; concerning the nLab entry "sieve" http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/sieve you had written
I am confused about the notion of "encoding" regarding sieves:
It seems that I had once used this word in an attempt to express the fact that while the notions of "sieve" (on an object) and "subfunctor" (of the functor represented by that object) are not _identitcal_ notions, one does determine ("encode") the other. Sorry if that wasn't a good formulation. Finn Lawler has meanwhile been so kind to improve the phrasing a bit. By the way, questions and comments about nLab pages are mostly best sent to the community of people who work on that wiki and these people can jointly be contacted by posting a message to the "nForum". There is now for instance a thread discussing your question, which you can see here: http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Mathforge/nForum/comments.php?DiscussionID=2534&page=1 All the best, Urs [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]