On the colength of fractional ideals

The main result in this paper is to supply a recursive formula, on the number of minimal primes, for the colength of a fractional ideal in terms of the maximal points of the value set of the ideal itself. The fractional ideals are taken in the class of complete admissible rings, a more general class of rings than those of algebroid curves. For such rings with two or three minimal primes, a closed formula for that colength is provided, so improving results by Barucci, D’Anna and Fr"oberg.