On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Albert van der Horst <alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> wrote: > That may be tong-in-cheek but mathematicians do exactly that. We > use roman, greek and hebrew alphabets in normal italics and boldface > and then some special characters for element-of, logical-or, integral signs, > triangles and what not. Underbarred and upper twiggled, as a suffix a prefix > or a superfix. All in the name of avoiding names longer than one character. > > When we run out then there are creative ways to combine known characters > into Jacobi symbols and choose functions. > > There are even conventions that allow to leave out characters, like > "juxtaposition means multiplication" and the Einstein summation convention.
This, I think, is the main reason for the one-character variable name convention. Why else are there subscripts? Instead of using "V0" (two-character name), you use "V₀" (one-character name with a subscript tag on it) to avoid collision with multiplication. > Now translate E=mc^2 into Java. Dunno, but in Python it would be: assert E==m*c*c And would probably fail, because that's all floating point :) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list