In 2000 Babson and Steingr{\'\i}msson introduced the notion of vincular
patterns in permutations. They shown that essentially all well-known Mahonian
permutation statistics can be written as combinations of such patterns. Also,
they proved and conjectured that other combinations of vincular patterns are
still Mahonian. These conjectures were proved later: by Foata and Zeilberger in
2001, and by Foata and Randrianarivony in 2006.
In this paper we give an alternative proof of some of these results. Our
approach is based on permutation codes which, like Lehmer's code, map
bijectively permutations onto subexcedant sequences. More precisely, we give
several code transforms (i.e., bijections between subexcedant sequences) which
when applied to Lehmer's code yield new permutation codes which count
occurrences of some vincular patterns