> A small group of people, people who are often not the ones building the libraries from this research, know what these symbols are likely to mean. If you're w

> A small group of people, people who are often not the ones building the libraries from this research, know what these symbols are likely to mean. If you're writing libraries to implement novel data structures fresh from academia, you can read the math. It's just like programming in a sense. I wouldn't say that it's a terrible practice to use symbols like > & | in code because they have different meanings in C and Bourne shell. You just gotta learn the context.