A better approach to near-MOS's up on the xenharmonic Wiki

http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/Near-MOS+Scales

I abandoned my previous suggestion of using scale coding and went for
a more obvious solution: all of the modern jazz perspective on modal
theory, which was likely developed partially as a way of explaining
impressionistic music (as per Bill Evans), is already effectively a
theory of near-MOS. There's already a system of indexing the modes of
melodic minor that already works well as a way to index near-MOS's in
general. This paradigm can be extended in such a way that allows for
the indexing of the near-MOS's of other scales in a manner that is
consistent with the current terminology and doesn't require any
recourse to periodicity blocks or mappings or ratios (just like MOS's
themselves).

Please feel free to extend this, or add to it, or clean it up. One
thing that would be useful are some theorems on when altering a note
will give you the same permuted near-MOS as altering some other note
(e.g. Ionian b3 is a mode of melodic minor, and Ionian #1 is also a
mode of melodic minor). I also didn't cover MOS's with
fractional-octave periods either, as they're a bit more complex (and
I'm not sure how altering the period would work).

General Algorithm
1. Start with the albitonic MOS that you want to modify.
2. Compute the chromatic step = L-s.
3. Find all of the resultant scales that lie at most N chromatic
alteration away from the original MOS, where N is the near-MOS maximum
alteration complexity that you want to search for.
4. If any of these scales end up being permutations of one another,
prune the duplicates.
5. If so desired, prune the results to eliminate improper scales.

-Mike