quoted text if you were in a burning building, you would try pretty hard to get out. Therefore, you must strongly dislike death and want to avoid it. But if you strongly dislike death and want to avoid it, you must be lying when you say you accept death as a natural part of life and think it's crass and selfish to try to cheat the Reaper.

Won't it be the case that someone who tries to escape from a burning building, does so, just to avoid the pain and suffering it inflicts? It would be such a drag to be burned alive rather than a peaceful painless poison death.

There might not be a better term for the operands of a suitably uncommon and abstract structure X than "things X operates on", so the single-letter names are as good as any.

No, they aren't! You can't search to jump between the usages and definitions of a single-letter name, but you can jump between the usages and definitions of a full-word name, even if that name is blarghle.

Haskell calls the sequences x:xs for "current x" and "the rest of the exes", which is pretty much all you can say about them from the context of the higher-order function.

Haskell can get away with this because it has strict, well-defined scoping rules which ensure that the names x and xs never appear too far from their definitions, and there is an algorithm which text editors can implement to find those definitions. Math books do not have either of those benefits.