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Ben McKay
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Mathematics uses very few variable names in any proof compared to the number of variable names occuring in typical programming languages. Variable names survive only for short passages, except for a small (less than a dozen) global variables. The names are subject to a host of conventions (for example, $\varepsilon$ is a small number, $N$ is a large number) which are not found in programming languages. More distinct symbols are available, as we are not constrained to use ASCII. Try to rewrite a serious piece of mathematics in the style of a programming language, and you will quickly see that it is unreadable.