I posted the same kind of question on StackOverflow

I definitely think that it worth using unicode in heavy math-related problems, because it makes it possible to read the formula directly, which is impossible with plain ASCII.

Imagine a debugging session: of course you can always hand-write the formula the code is supposed to compute to see if its correct. But ninety percent of the time, you won't bother and the bug can stay hidden for a long, looong time. And no one is ever willing to look at this abstruse 7-line, plain ASCII formula. Of course, using unicode isn't as good as a tex-rendered formula, but it is way better.

The alternative of using long descriptive names is not viable because in math, if the identifier is not short, the formula will look even more complicated (why do you think people, around the XVIII century, began to replace "plus" by "+" and "minus" by "-" ?).

Personnally, I would also use some subscripts and superscripts (I just copy-paste them from this page). For instance: (had python allowed √ as an identifier)

√ = math.sqrt #function alias
c² = c**2
σʷ² = σʷ**2
γ² = γ**2
σ′ʷ = √(σʷ² * (1 - (σʷ²/c²)*Wʷⁱⁿ(t, e)) + γ²)

Where I used superscripts because there is no subscript equivalent in unicode. (Unfortunately, the unicode subscript character set is very limited. I hope that one day, subscripting in unicode will be considered as diacritics, i.e. a combination of one char for subscript, and another char for the subscripted letter)

One last thing, I think this conversation about using non-ASCII character is primarily biased, because many programmers never deal with "formula intensive mathematical notations". So they think that this question is not that important, because they never experienced a significant portion of code that would require the use of non-ASCII identifiers. If you are one of them (and I was until recently), consider this: suppose that the letter "a" is not part of ASCII. Then you will have a pretty good idea of the problem of having none of greek letters, subscripts, superscripts when computing non-trivial math formulas.

I posted the same kind of question on StackOverflow

I definitely think that it worth using unicode in heavy math-related problems, because it makes it possible to read the formula directly, which is impossible with plain ASCII.

Imagine a debugging session: of course you can always hand-write the formula the code is supposed to compute to see if its correct. But ninety percent of the time, you won't bother and the bug can stay hidden for a long, looong time. And no one is ever willing to look at this abstruse 7-line, plain ASCII formula. Of course, using unicode isn't as good as a tex-rendered formula, but it is way better.

The alternative of using long descriptive names is not viable because in math, if the identifier is not short, the formula will look even more complicated (why do you think people, around the XVIII century, began to replace "plus" by "+" and "minus" by "-" ?).

Personnally, I would also use some subscripts and superscripts (I just copy-paste them from this page). For instance: (had python allowed √ as an identifier)

√ = math.sqrt #function alias
c² = c**2
σʷ² = σʷ**2
γ² = γ**2
σ′ʷ = √(σʷ² * (1 - (σʷ²/c²)*Wʷⁱⁿ(t, e)) + γ²)

Where I used superscripts because there is no subscript equivalent in unicode. (Unfortunately, the unicode subscript character set is very limited. I hope that one day, subscripting in unicode will be considered as diacritics, i.e. a combination of one char for subscript, and another char for the subscripted letter)

One last thing, I think this conversation about using non-ASCII character is primarily biased, because many programmers never deal with "formula intensive mathematical notations". So they think that this question is not that important, because they never experienced a significant portion of code that would require the use of non-ASCII identifiers. If you are one of them (and I was until recently), consider this: suppose that the letter "a" is not part of ASCII. Then you will have a pretty good idea of the problem of having none of greek letters, subscripts, superscripts when computing non-trivial math formulas.