Moreover, you might think that Lisp notation would improve it, but CS papers using S-expressions are just as incomprehensible, even to a seasoned Lisp programmer.

Math notations are two-dimensional and don't suffer very badly from structural ambiguities, so that actually fixes almost nothing.

The problem in unfamiliar math notations is rarely the chunking of which clump is a child of which clump.

E.g say that some paper uses, say, angle brackets, with some deep meaning that you can learn about if you recurse three levels down in the list of references.

I'm not confused that in <Ap>, the Ap thing is a child of the angle brackets; and calling it (frob (A p)) doesn't help much in this regard.

However, at least you can search literature for the word frob more easily than for angle brackets.

>I'm not confused that in <Ap>, the Ap thing is a child of the angle brackets; and calling it (frob (A p)) doesn't help much in this regard. However, at least you can search literature for the word frob more easily than for angle brackets.

Also it's perhaps more likely to occur to the person using the frob notation that maybe they should define frob somwewhere.

I think you can easily pick examples from any field of terribly written papers but I'm attempting to describe my experience of interacting with both disciplines over many years; reading many books and papers from both.