> The issue is never actually explicitly stating "R represents the set of real numbers" or "n is a natural number".
It's at the start of like... every book ever. Pretty much any book on mathematics will start off with a fairly in-depth list of symbols.
It's the math equivalent of expecting you know what a 'while' loop is when you go reading through the documentation for a library (reading a paper) - basic programming literacy is assumed.
Yep, it's also a good practice for programming. Describe every single-letter variable in the README, which everyone obviously reads and memorizes before diving into the code. I still do this as a throwback to the days when we wrote code on parchment that cost a week's wages per square cubit.
You realize that there are fairly standard single letter variables in programming, for which people are supposed to understand the type of the object, right?
I see a lot of 'n' for a number, 'i', 'j', 'k' for loop indexes, 'a' and 'b' for the variables in a swap function, 'f' and 'g' for various things involving function composition.
The case of knowing what a capital pi or sigma means, however, is much more like knowing what a "while" loop is.
It's at the start of like... every book ever. Pretty much any book on mathematics will start off with a fairly in-depth list of symbols.
It's the math equivalent of expecting you know what a 'while' loop is when you go reading through the documentation for a library (reading a paper) - basic programming literacy is assumed.