It's good practice anyway in LaTeX to define your own aliases and use them for semantic information. Like in one of my recent projects, I define:
\newcommand{\disjointunion}{\sqcup}Now we're getting close to the heart of the matter: In LaTeX it's "good practice" to define the semantics of operators, in programming languages it's an absolute requirement.
Yeah, it's a bummer that LaTeX math notation is really just markup and has no indication of what belongs together and what the purpose of various symbols is.
LaTeX... now that is unreadable. Traditional mathematical notation is just fine.
Re:Mathematical Notation Is Awful
by pwdisswordfish on Sunday July 31, 2016 @07:32AM
(#12196502)
Well, when I write TeX (and I stick to the "good practice" of defining "semantic" macros for common symbols), I often notice myself finding the TeX source code more readable than the PDF it produces.
Have you seen x86 machine code? ;P
Wouldn't it be great if every time you saw a mathematical formula there was a little widget to push that would show you the "source code" in LATEX++, and LATEX++ was like LATEX but made up of stringently defined mathematical operations (like '\element_wise_multiplication' instead of '\plus_sign_with_circle_around_it')? :D