Re:Ask HN: How did you learn math notation?
by cabalamat on Friday November 26, 2021 @05:14AM
(#29348925)
>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.
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.