Jeff Moden (8/9/2014)
With the understanding you have of that counting problem and the additional understanding that I don't ask "trick" questions or questions based on trivia, explain or even speculate on what this method could be used for.
I would imagine that you're doing this to populate a tally table--I know those are a thing that can be used to make various T-SQL tasks easier and faster, although I can't actually think of an example of using one off the top of my head.