NOT.7:2 - Problem

How can a notation be made easier to use without removing the distinctions, dependencies or operations on which its usefulness depends?

Shortness, visual neatness and familiarity can each help particular work, but none identifies the difficult operation. A repeated value may be easy to read and costly to change. A shared name may make the change local while sending readers elsewhere to recover the value. A new arrangement must be judged through those operations.

The repair also has to separate expression from assistance. An author can explain the missing connection during a trial, making an unchanged notation appear successful. A trained reader can reconstruct a relation that the expression never supplies. Those contributions may be useful, but they change what the notation itself has achieved.