I am doing some work with asymptotic expansions of the form
and I don’t care about second-order terms. The parentheses are there to indicate that these are term labels, not powers. But actually, there’s no need to have them, because if I ever need to raise something to the zeroth power, I can just write 1; and if I need to raise something to the first power, I don’t need to write the power at all. So, there’s no confusion at all by writing instead of
! If I need to square it, I can write
. If I need to square
, then I can write
; it’s unlikely I’ll need to take anything to the 12th power.
It’s an awful idea and a sane reviewer would reject it, but it does save time when LaTeXing…