MRAB writes:

 > That's a strange thing to do. It's more usual to use a _subscript_ to 
 > indicate an index: a₃ vs a³

Oh, we economic theorists do that too.  It's typically a
double-indexed array of parameters, where both rows and columns can be
meaningfully be treated as vectors.  So a₃ is the vector of
quantities of good 3 produced by all firms, while a³ is the vector of
quantities of all goods produced by firm 3.  Or in analysis of
international or interregional trade, there's an index indicating
which country exports which good to which importing country.  Some
people put the good index in the superscript and the two countries in
the subscript, others the opposite.  IIRC, mathematical physicist use
both subscript and superscript in tensor notation, nuclear physicists
use one for atomic number and the other for atomic weight (and thus
would expect both subscript and superscript to be treated lexically as
identifier components, not as expression components).

The point is not that polynomials are not the most common use of
superscript notation -- I don't care one way or the other.  It's that
there are many uses, important to those fields, that aren't
polynomials.

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