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MrEldritch | 6 years ago

These are very interesting! The Legible Mathematics one also made me think of APL, which is very hard to read - but specifically it's hard to read for the same reason that traditional linear programming math is hard to read, the lack of visual grouping[1]. I wonder how it might be possible to redesign something like APL to take advantage of rich text and more complex formatting?

[1] The weird symbols might seem like an initial barrier to this, but they're only hard to read if you're unfamiliar with APL; they're actually very easy to learn and remember, as there's not that many of them and they all do very basic operations. However, APL loves operator overloading and likes to give operators different functions based on whether they're used in prefix ("monadic") or infix ("dyadic") forms, and there are also higher-order operators that consume the operators immediately adjacent to them and then operate on the expressions after that; all of this makes the nominally right-to-left parsing require a fair bit of mental effort instead of being able to rely on immediate visual recognition.

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