I know what you meant and I agree, i just read you as (alao) saying that he single lines could be norm. There are situations where you wouldn’t simplify, like if this expression was the result of some function applications and then in the next step you simplify it.

R can definitely be seen as a vector space, just like R^3 for example, but then you wouldn’t also have absolute valley.

It wouldn’t be ambiguous in ASCII either because c would be defined earlier, you’d know what it is.