>Why is okay for mathemeticians to abbreviate things but programmers? Is it because they deal in more abstract entities where the name is irrelevant?

for example, xyz^2 in a piece of written math means something different than it would in a program (in the math case we are obviously not taking the variable "xyz" and squaring it). I guess what I am trying to say with this example is that perhaps variable names in math are one symbol because concatenation, in many cases, already means "multiply".