===DIVERSE CHARACTER SETS IN CODE===

Currently a singular set of characters trivially entered on virtually all current developers keyboards is used to create English language keywords and identifiers formed out of ASCII characters that on any decent programming font are trivially distinguishable and identifiable.

Whether or not you think this is ideal or equitable people who natively speak any of thousands of languages and numerous character sets can trivially communicate and write mutually intelligible code with font serving only as a aesthetic choice.

17 people from 17 different places each using their own characters and whatever special characters they please produce code that not one of the 17 should be able to type easily with numerous look alike characters in and it should lift choice of font from a aesthetic choice to a functional that effects not only the font selected in the editor but potentially the editor itself given the need to support interesting things like combined characters. Given this the logical thing to do would be for people to agree not to stick any weird characters in your code...which is what I think most people do even on languages that have such a feature indicating its basically kind of useless.

> "easier to type": depends on you keyboard layout…
Yes you would be advised to use an English layout or something which makes it easy to type these characters. You are also going to be using english keywords for example.

> "more descriptive": depends on the operation; a lot of math symbols for example need pages long descriptions when written out…

Such symbols also have an English name. The alternative to the special character isn't a pages long description of the operation its the name.

> "more memorable": depends on your native language, and the language the text description is written in…

A word in a singular small character set is easier to remember than an identifier that could contain thousands of different characters some of which are only found in a fraction of your people's languages and many which look alike. It takes more bits to encode because it is trivially more complicated.

===MATH VS CODE===

I never said that math was useless. I said single character identifiers especially ones which change from context to context are useless. There is no reason to believe that because math has similarity to math that a similar notation is valuable or indeed even that mathematical notation is particularly good.

> It becomes actually less understandable as you need to parse (and remember!) much larger chunks to get the meaning. A human brain has only max. 5 seconds of working memory (most people have less). Long words use up this capacity much more quickly than short symbols. That's a fact. (Just look up who can do better mental arithmetic on average, and how this correlates with the length of word used for numbers in the native language of those people).

My recollection is that its not a certain number of seconds of working memory but how many balls you can keep up in the air and your brain works around this problem by in effect remembering one "chunk" as opposed to its constituent parts which is why you can basically function at all. There is no evidence whatsoever that using symbolic representation of non ascii characters improves programming performance or indeed that any part of that statement is accurate. Seeing as there are several languages in which one can use both entirely ascii text along with whatever unicode you like you ought to be able to back up your assertion with a citation.