Unicode: a great idea, if used prudently!
Just finished implementing some small package
- The calculations therein are based mostly on one paper. It was immensely helpful for me to be able to use the same notation as in the paper, with all these
α
,β
,ϕ
,Rₛ
,Rₚ
etc. I was even able to copy some formulas from the paper’s pdf into the code and just edit it slightly. - In physics,
μ₀
is unambiguous, at least in the context of electromagnetism, and formulas using it are better readable IMO. - One of the problems which cost me half
a daya night of debugging was that elliptic integrals inSpecialFunctions
are defined usingm
as argument, notk
, withk²=m
. I haven’t RTFM, only checked quickly the function help, and didn’t pay attention to havingm
here andk
in Wikipedia. Had the function help usedk²
, which is just as valid identifier, instead ofm
, it could save me a lot of time.