Math notations are not as universal as many would like to think, sadly.

And I am not sure the historical accident is really irrelevant; as the same "accident" was involved in most of the computer languages and protocols we use daily, I would not be at all surprised to find that there are subtle dependencies buried in the whole mess --- similar to how (most... sigh) humans pick up language and culture signals as children too young to apply any kind of critical analysis to it, and can have real problems trying to eradicate or modify them later. (Yes, languages can be fixed. But how many tools do you use when working with them? It's almost certainly more than the ones that immediately come to mind or are listed on e.g. Hackage. In particular, that ligature may be great in your editor and unfortunate when you pop a terminal and grep for it --- especially if you start extending this to other languages so you need a different set of ligatures [a different font!] for each language....)
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