My point wasn't actually that it's a useful thing to pursue shortest ways of writing a given algorithm. In fact I am not an APL expert, and find it hard to read. My point is that there is no particular reason other than inertia that we happen to formalize mathematical/algorithmic ideas via a linear string of ascii characters. In fact, this representation makes it unnatural to {reason about|write algorithms on} many common types of structures. The fact that many attempts to do something better do poorly (as the great-grand-parent poster experienced) does not mean improvements do not exist -- the space is very large.

For example, a regular expression is a graph. Why on earth do we insist on encoding it as a very hard to read string of ASCII? (I am sure one could be a very efficient regexp jockey with practice, but in some sense the representation is working against us and our powerful vision subsystem). There are all these theorems in graphical models that have proofs much easier for humans to follow because they use graph theory and not algebra, etc.