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Date: Sat, 17 May 2014 23:18:21 +1000
Subject: Re: PEP 8 : Maximum line Length :
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:71683

On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 10:52 PM, Albert van der Horst
<albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> wrote:
> That may be tong-in-cheek but mathematicians do exactly that. We
> use roman, greek and hebrew alphabets in normal italics and boldface
> and then some special characters for element-of, logical-or, integral sig=
ns,
> triangles and what not. Underbarred and upper twiggled, as a suffix a pre=
fix
> or a superfix. All in the name of avoiding names longer than one characte=
r.
>
> When we run out then there are creative ways to combine known characters
> into Jacobi symbols and choose functions.
>
> There are even conventions that allow to leave out characters, like
> "juxtaposition means multiplication" and the Einstein summation conventio=
n.

This, I think, is the main reason for the one-character variable name
convention. Why else are there subscripts? Instead of using "V0"
(two-character name), you use "V=E2=82=80" (one-character name with a
subscript tag on it) to avoid collision with multiplication.

> Now translate E=3Dmc^2 into Java.

Dunno, but in Python it would be:

assert E=3D=3Dm*c*c

And would probably fail, because that's all floating point :)

ChrisA