[polymatter]

I agree. To clarify, its not that the reader gets confused between the gas constant and the set of real numbers. The issue is never actually explicitly stating "R represents the set of real numbers" or "n is a natural number".

At uni it once took me hours to work out that "." was used for function application in one particular paper. "." was also used for multiplication and (in some example code) had the usual object oriented meaning in the same paper. It was incredibly frustrating.

[DerpDerpDerp]

> The issue is never actually explicitly stating "R represents the set of real numbers" or "n is a natural number".

It's at the start of like... every book ever. Pretty much any book on mathematics will start off with a fairly in-depth list of symbols.

It's the math equivalent of expecting you know what a 'while' loop is when you go reading through the documentation for a library (reading a paper) - basic programming literacy is assumed.

[neurobro]

Yep, it's also a good practice for programming. Describe every single-letter variable in the README, which everyone obviously reads and memorizes before diving into the code. I still do this as a throwback to the days when we wrote code on parchment that cost a week's wages per square cubit.

[DerpDerpDerp]

You realize that there are fairly standard single letter variables in programming, for which people are supposed to understand the type of the object, right?

I see a lot of 'n' for a number, 'i', 'j', 'k' for loop indexes, 'a' and 'b' for the variables in a swap function, 'f' and 'g' for various things involving function composition.

The case of knowing what a capital pi or sigma means, however, is much more like knowing what a "while" loop is.