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Re:Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused by neurobro on Wednesday March 05, 2014 @08:44PM (#7351310)
Yep, it's also a good practice for programming. Describe every single-letter variable in the README, which everyone obviously reads and memorizes before diving into the code. I still do this as a throwback to the days when we wrote code on parchment that cost a week's wages per square cubit.
Re:Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused by DerpDerpDerp on Thursday March 06, 2014 @02:59PM (#7356190)
You realize that there are fairly standard single letter variables in programming, for which people are supposed to understand the type of the object, right?

I see a lot of 'n' for a number, 'i', 'j', 'k' for loop indexes, 'a' and 'b' for the variables in a swap function, 'f' and 'g' for various things involving function composition.

The case of knowing what a capital pi or sigma means, however, is much more like knowing what a "while" loop is.