While I see where you’re coming from as an application programming, people who do primarily scientific programming ∑ is much more intuitive than 'sum'. When I w

While I see where you’re coming from as an application programming, people who do primarily scientific programming ∑ is much more intuitive than 'sum'. When I was doing scientific programming I would have killed for unicode source support. There isn’t always an obvious way to transform a math variable into ASCII. Consider,β for example, which can mean “the ratio of the thermal energy density to the magnetic energy density of a plasma”. In conversation people generally pronounce that as just “beta”. You could spell “beta” out in code, of course, but what if you have a β sub σ and a β sub s to juggle? And what if you have a prime or a superscript on those variables too? The hairier equations can juggle several similar variables and carry on for several lines of code. It isn’t always obvious how to break them apart into smaller functions like you would in a normal application. Using income literals instead of spelling variables out can save a lot of space. More importantly, it makes the code look more like the source material, which makes mistakes much easier to spot.