4 ms·
ugh, why the single letter variables? Makes the text that much harder to read imo. I keep having to think to myself "oh yeah, that means 'the key'"
by bruce343434 5y ago
ugh, why the single letter variables? Makes the text that much harder to read imo. I keep having to think to myself "oh yeah, that means 'the key'"
- bowmessage 5y agobut it makes the author look smart /s[arcasm]
- Koshkin 5y agoIn mathematical writing variable names are usually single-letter. (This, in fact, makes mathematics easier to read and, especially, compute with.)
- Gigachad 5y agoI think sometimes this makes sense. In a lot of math, there isn’t actually a reasonable name for the variable. It’s intermediary and has no real meaning other than it’s full definition. But I think sometimes they do take it too far and use single letters when full names could exist.
- bruce343434 5y agoIn this case the author literally gives the full names sometimes. And in fact he leads a paragraph with "Asserting the non-existence (2) of the ciphertext" so whether something gets a one letter variable and some formal logic operator or whether it gets expressed in plain English seems totally arbitrary.
- ouid 5y agoThere's a lot of symmetry in the formula, and if you start throwing a bunch of english into the mix, it becomes harder to see. That symmetry is often important for synthesizine a new argument, whereas the naming conventions are important for reminding you what the objects in question are. This factors the reader's job and the writer's job fairly cleanly. The reader is responsible for mapping their intuition onto the objects being referenced, and the writer is responsible for demonstrating their relationship.