Abstract
A formal description of a quantum abacus based encoding system is presented. This way of representing data for processing purposes is based on a quantum algorithm for counting qubits introduced by Lesovik et al. \cite{LesovikEtal2010} and Suslov et al. \cite{SuslovEtal2011}, but formally developed in this work. Finally, in order to illustrate the potential of this proposal, the implementation of the basic quantum array operations through this encoding system is presented.