Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ben_bradley 1890 days ago
Both math(s) and (almost?) all programming languages have their quirks and inconsistencies. What immediately comes to mind is (a thing I've recently learned) the template syntax of C++ where if you get a single character wrong you get dozens of lines of error messages (there's a code golf on exactly this).

At least with programming, you generally don't see different semantics depending on the value of something! With math, there's sin^2 as in: sin^2 theta + cos^2 theta = 1, which reads the square of the sin of theta, etc. But then there's sin^-1 which means the inverse sine AKA arcsine, and NOT 1 / sine, which would be consistent with previous usage.