Let's say I have a sequence of values (e.g., 3, 5, 8, 12, 15) and I want to occasionally decrease all of them by a certain value.
If I store them as the sequence (0, 2, 3, 4, 3) and keep a variable as a base of 3, I now only have to change the base (and check the first items) whenever I want to decrease them instead of actually going over all the values.
I know there's an official term for this, but when I literally translate from my native language to English it doesn't come out right.