&gt;&gt; Reading &quot;sum&quot; &quot;mul&quot; etc. takes longer than if you have visual anchors like * +.<p>&gt; Citation for this? IMO it&#x27;s exactly the opposite, but I may be wrong. Some kind of reference would be nice.<p>I know it from myself and don&#x27;t think I have to to provide evidence that by large most people work like this. Reading and interpreting text is just WAY more complex a process and thus much slower than associating a shape with a meaning.<p>For example, application designers have known for a long time that it&#x27;s important to build a symbolic language (icons etc) because that&#x27;s just way faster (once you have learned what the symbol means, for example with the help of a tooltip).<p>There&#x27;s another guy who explained this at length<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2.com&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;wiki?LispLacksVisualCues" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;c2.com&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;wiki?LispLacksVisualCues</a><p>Search for &quot;top&quot; throughout the page.<p>&gt;     (+ a b c d) vs. a + b + c + d<p>Yes. But as explained in my other comment, that&#x27;s not optimizing for the common case.