Cryptography is hard to implement correctly. What you consider to be obscure and destroying readability is not necessarily there because of semantics, but in or

Cryptography is hard to implement correctly. What you consider to be obscure and destroying readability is not necessarily there because of semantics, but in order to avoid particular vulnerability categories, such as timing side channel attacks, due to using particular coding patterns or the compiler optimizing things in a certain way. The good language you talk about exists in crypto libraries that are meant to be used by us mere mortals. This document discusses some of the problems and solutions that are important if you are building those very same crypto libraries instead. On that note, veorq is an absolute authority in the field so I trust his writing on the matter.