Not really disagreeing, just chiming in as a mathematician who does a lot of programming: Mathematicians handle variable scope all the time--I would argue that

Not really disagreeing, just chiming in as a mathematician who does a lot of programming: Mathematicians handle variable scope all the time--I would argue that a variable's scope is generally the section, subsection, lemma, theorem, etc that it is defined in. If I write "let x be ..." in the proof of a lemma, I sure don't intend for it to be a global variable. It's not unusual to have an index of symbols at the end of a paper or book. Also, anonymous objects are fine and used all the time. "Applying z => z^2 to the region U, ..." or some such thing. I'm not sure it would be very useful to try to coordinate some standard notation for all of this. Anyway, one nice thing about writing math is that you can make up whatever notation you need, as you need it, and no compiler can tell you not to :)