You are supposed to have the paper handy. Either you know the paper by heart, or you are actually learning the paper and look at the implementation. Otherwise you really have nothing to do in this piece of code.
Even more mundane codebase are like that. Variable are named in the context of the project. If you have no familiarity with the project variable "user" or "u" means exactly the same to you: nothing.
The difference is that generally regular project are huge in size but simple, while filesystem, compression/encryption algorightm, trading algorithm are tiny but extremely complex. In the former, you use more descriptive naming because people will only have a high level knowledge of the spec. In the later, there is no difference between spec and code, extreme familiarity is necessary to touch the code and naming convention crutches are simply unnecessary.
You are supposed to have the paper handy. Either you know the paper by heart, or you are actually learning the paper and look at the implementation. Otherwise you really have nothing to do in this piece of code.
Even more mundane codebase are like that. Variable are named in the context of the project. If you have no familiarity with the project variable "user" or "u" means exactly the same to you: nothing.
The difference is that generally regular project are huge in size but simple, while filesystem, compression/encryption algorightm, trading algorithm are tiny but extremely complex. In the former, you use more descriptive naming because people will only have a high level knowledge of the spec. In the later, there is no difference between spec and code, extreme familiarity is necessary to touch the code and naming convention crutches are simply unnecessary.