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["Alan MacHett" <machett AT ibiblio.org>]

anyone know of a search engine where punctuation counts?  by and large,
punctuation should be ignored in searches, however at the moment I'm
trying to look up the definition of "n!" and the search engines are
ignoring the exclamation point.

to that end, what *is* the longhand for "n!"?  I don't believe it's the
same as "n + n^2 + n^3 + ... n^n" -- which really is the problem I'm
trying to solve.  Is there a shorthand (say, perhaps a calculator
function) for "n^1 + ... n^n"??

...because I'm trying to solve it for 26 (letters in the alphabet. 
eventually for the 95 non-control characters of the keyboard ... yes, this
is closely related to brute force attacking (but not what I'm doing; just
contemplating the math)  -- the number of unique combinations of N
characters up to a sequence of N characters.  for example, for 3 the
answer is 39:
  3 + 3^2 + 3^3 = 3 + 9 + 27 = 39
  because the unique combinations are A, B, C, AA, ...CC, AAA, ...CCC

-just curious
-Alan
...and, no, I'm not "following the President's lead" ... which reminds me;
no one ever chimed in on why urls are so haphazard...?