> math notation is indeed high-yield and low-effort low-effort is perhaps “your mileage may wary”, as they say :) but the yield per square inch of paper does i

> math notation is indeed high-yield and low-effort low-effort is perhaps “your mileage may wary”, as they say :) but the yield per square inch of paper does indeed make math the most powerful and expressive language known to humans. On that note, Ken Iverson was very concerned that tons of mathematical symbolic conventions and speak overlap and conflict with each other to an obscene degree. As we all know, that little book he wrote on this very subject eventually got him a Turing award when people finally realized what he did there. That said (and please no offense APL and typography fiends who are reading this) a considerable portion of the funny APL chars was a hard compromise dictated by economics and physics of IBM Selectric typeball. With that in mind, if you take a fresh look at the original APL charset, you will see that much of it is stone-stupid overtypes of two ASCII chars. Why? Because IBM, that’s why. El Cheapo.