Well, avoiding Unicode in API (or at least giving an option not to use it) is good. But (as someone pointed out already), code is read more often than it is written. So we should try to make the graphical presentation of the internal code (i.e. not API) as easy on the reader as possible. The ability of readers to affect the graphical presentation of Unicode is typically limited (viz Github), and hence use of problematic symbols should be prohibited, and use of other symbols should be considered from the point of view of visual confusion (viz \rho vs p vs rho etc.).
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