It probably depends a lot on the context, but in most situations I would find multi-character variable names distracting. It may work well for short formulae, but try to write down the Taylor series for the hypergeometric 2F1 function, and it may end up like
Well, I rather prefer the standard way. Incidentally, once I have argued with a man who held even more drastic stance on this, saying not only that all mathematical formulae should be replaced by algorithms, but also that the raw TeX input is more readable than the processed output. And he even wasn’t a programmer.
I think we need to draw a distinction between variables that are used on the same line where they’re bound, and variables that live longer. Naming things firstpar, secondpar, thirdpar is silly in this context, because if they had single-letter names, the names would still be right there on the same line where they’re used. But I actually did look up Pochhammer there, and got a reminder of its definition as the first search result, and I couldn’tve done that if the TeX symbol were used instead.
It probably depends a lot on the context, but in most situations I would find multi-character variable names distracting. It may work well for short formulae, but try to write down the Taylor series for the hypergeometric 2F1 function, and it may end up like
HypG (firstpar, secondpar, thirdpar, variable) = Sum (i=0, inf, i++) ( variable^i Pochhammer (firstpar, i) Pochhammer (secondpar, i) / ( Pochhammer (thirdpar, i) * Factorial (i) ))
Well, I rather prefer the standard way. Incidentally, once I have argued with a man who held even more drastic stance on this, saying not only that all mathematical formulae should be replaced by algorithms, but also that the raw TeX input is more readable than the processed output. And he even wasn’t a programmer.
I think we need to draw a distinction between variables that are used on the same line where they’re bound, and variables that live longer. Naming things firstpar, secondpar, thirdpar is silly in this context, because if they had single-letter names, the names would still be right there on the same line where they’re used. But I actually did look up Pochhammer there, and got a reminder of its definition as the first search result, and I couldn’tve done that if the TeX symbol were used instead.