On the other hand, if a tool only covers 10% of the notation you care about because of a restriction like plain-text, it’s very difficult to document what you’r

On the other hand, if a tool only covers 10% of the notation you care about because of a restriction like plain-text, it’s very difficult to document what you’re doing as you bump up against this boundary. Humans have been using nonlinear notation in a wide variety of fields, but computer programming languages seem especially stuck on plain text everywhere, despite the utility of such notation. I would rather faff around for a minute or two trying to figure out how to change my integration limits in a comment than leave some horrendous documentation comment like “computes the integral from a to b of the blah blah blah blah” and by this point because you can’t see the familiar notation, you first have to interpret it before checking the function. (Several PhD students I know working in applied mathematics and physics will “translate” these comments from code onto a scrap piece of paper in front of them, before attempting to dig into the function). Personally I think it would be great if I could embed more rich text (styling, equations, and images) in comments to better communicate my intent. This stuff otherwise just winds up being left out (because it’s too hard), or in some other separate documentation which is difficult to keep in sync during development.