That's more of an issue for languages that use infix notation for operators. Lisp uses prefix notation, that's why a-b is not a problem. As a practitione

That's more of an issue for languages that use infix notation for operators. Lisp uses prefix notation, that's why a-b is not a problem. As a practitioner, you don't get confused at all when you encounter a variable name that contains a dash, because you don't even read it as a subtraction. Your brain is trained to match only the (- a b) pattern for that.