I'm more of a fan of having multi-character symbols than to try and pigeonhole every concept into one symbol. Have full or partial names, just like we do in programming. We started down that path with writing things like sin x, cos t, div f, |rad|, etc. We should continue! If people really have problems distinguishing we can go the Perl route and add sigils.
Now that I have been programming for longer than doing maths, I just must wonder why math community seem so entrenched in using single letter variable/function names. How confusing larger source codes would be if programmers did the same.
You've never looked at academic or numerical code, have you? It's totally fugly. Go skim the first edition of Numerical Recipes in C--it'll give you nightmares.
I'd say it's the other way 'round: the problem of the invisible multiplication operator is that it precludes multi-character symbols. (I think Dijkstra wrote about that.)
Yup, and he was absolutely right. I've adopted multicharacter names (though usually abbreviations or short ones) for my day to day calculations, and a visible multiplication.
Mind you, if I get deep into integration and the only reflexes from my Jackson days kick back in, the notation reverts entirely. At some point it magically switches back after the act of integration is done, though.
Well, I almost typed PHP, since that was my first programming language, but that seems to have a bad reputation around here. The downside to subscripts is I have to write smaller, but I guess they might be better depending on your opinion of sigils. I still remember though wondering why JavaScript, when I was learning it, didn't have dollar signs in front of all its variables like PHP did, since it seemed like a great idea to my younger self. Eventually as I learned more languages and practiced more programming I realized sigils are unnecessary, like Hungarian notation (which I'm glad I never used and I'm glad its practice was basically already dead by the time I picked up programming). People won't get confused. Just like people don't get confused when they see sin3/5pix on paper and misinterpret sin(3/5 * pi * x(t)) as s * i * n * 3/5 * pi * x.
