[d8421l01vv4r]

In some branches of engineering (traditional engineering, not software), there are sometimes too few symbols in the Latin and Greek alphabets, so they have to rely heavily on subscripts. Expanding the set of symbols would be useful here, but I guess it's hard to get people to accept change unless they absolutely have to.

[Jtsummers]

A part of the problem is character entry. If it were easy to enter in all these symbols APL may have taken off and we wouldn't have gotten ASCII variants of it like J. So it's somewhat easier to just take our latin alphabet and turn a single symbol into a pair of letters or a letter with a subscript.

The symbols in math are great for writing by hand, but can become cumbersome when typing.