> A bit more consistency doesn't have to come at the expense of terseness and expressiveness. Yeah, mathematicians are often ambiguous out of laziness, because

> A bit more consistency doesn't have to come at the expense of terseness and expressiveness. Yeah, mathematicians are often ambiguous out of laziness, because they have no incentive to make it terse+unambiguous, and making it terse+unambiguous takes more effort than making it terse. Also sometimes you cannot get maximal terseness and unambiguity at the same time. For example if f is a function of 2 real variables, you fix the first to be x_0 and take the derivative with respect to the second, I would write this as f'(x_0, y), but I'm sure you agree that this is ambiguous to some people.