&gt; Why do mathematicians not use<p>Please tell me why should I care. No, really - I&#x27;m a programmer, not a mathematician.<p>&gt; Reading &quot;sum&quot; &quot;mul&quot; etc. takes longer than if you have visual anchors like * +.<p>Citation for this?<p>IMO it&#x27;s exactly the opposite, but I may be wrong. Some kind of reference would be nice.<p>&gt; And infix is an advantage for simple expressions, because they split arguments, where as with sexps you have to parse from left to right and count parens.<p>Ok, so 2 (&quot;sum&quot; vs. &quot;+&quot;, 3 vs. 1 char) additional characters are bad, because they take longer to read, but for example 3 additional characters here:<p><pre><code>    (+ a b c d)
    vs.
    a + b + c + d
</code></pre>
are good, because they take longer to read. That&#x27;s interesting.