Also, being very frugal with token length seems to be a thing into the 1960′s, see Unix e.g. “ls -l” instead of the far more human eye friendly “list -long” I don’t exactly understand why but apparently this wasn’t really a priority until about, say, 1995 when more and more programmers said fsck Perl with its unreadably frugal letter soup and use stuff like Python, where things are expressed in actual words.
I guess there are good reasons behind it. I still don’t have to like it.
See Comment formatting/Escaping special symbols on the wiki for more details (I’ve backslash-escaped underscores _ in the text part of the link to avoid their turning surrounding texts into italics, and the closing round bracket in the URL part of the link to avoid its interpretation as the end of the URL).
I think historically math started with longer variables, but it wasn’t so convenient. Compare:
3x^2 + 4x + 1 = 0
with
three times the square of a value, and four times the value, and one, equals nothing
The latter may be easier to read, but the former is easier to divide by x+1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_(mathematics)#Genesis_and_evolution_of_the_concept
Also, being very frugal with token length seems to be a thing into the 1960′s, see Unix e.g. “ls -l” instead of the far more human eye friendly “list -long” I don’t exactly understand why but apparently this wasn’t really a priority until about, say, 1995 when more and more programmers said fsck Perl with its unreadably frugal letter soup and use stuff like Python, where things are expressed in actual words.
I guess there are good reasons behind it. I still don’t have to like it.
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See Comment formatting/Escaping special symbols on the wiki for more details (I’ve backslash-escaped underscores _ in the text part of the link to avoid their turning surrounding texts into italics, and the closing round bracket in the URL part of the link to avoid its interpretation as the end of the URL).