To intersection{mathematicians,programmers}:

   does equation numbering and reference feel like goto statements?

Dijkstra’s tirade against goto:

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html

Knuth’s defense for structured programming:

“Structured programming with go to statements”

Anyways, rampant goto statements are abhorrent to both of them, and everybody else. The agreement is that it is a necessary evil in low-enough-level codes to optimize, but jumping lines are by nature unnatural for human readers.

But fellow mathematicians, don’t you feel like reading somebody’s paper with equation number over two dozens is likewise a torture? They feel like a goto statement actually, and your linear flow of reading is disrupted again and again by the necessity to refer to something that refer to something (and loop), or worse, another unpublished article, or (gasp) a volume over 500 pages.

This line of thought is triggered by the criticisms of the engineering students against a certain matlab course’s “explanatory document” written by a Math professor.

Seriously, that’s not a surprise to me because I knew this professor, and he is not unique. Mathematical presentation is hugely influenced by the TeX typesetting system by Knuth… and the inherent idea of cross-referencing isn’t that different from goto from the point of view of a reader.

Perhaps, as much as structure is found important in a program, some conceptual organization is necessary to write a readable mathematical prose – both are a form of prose anyway, with esoteric languages that the untrained cannot comprehend.

Why make the life hard, for others’ and ours’ alike? How will you understand your own paper ten years from now? Can you summarize your idea using a few sentences that make common sense?

Publish or perish, what a vicious cycle.