I'm sorry you thought so. It pops up pretty often and always seems to spark a lot of conversation, so I think most programmers that give it any thought can find it a very interesting area of study.

There's an incredible amount of creep: We have what starts with nice notation (like x-y) and have to trade a (massively increased) load in either our minds or in the heat our computer generates. I don't think that's right, and I think the language we use can help us do better.

> What is the "right answer"?

What do you think it is?

Everyone wants the punchline, but this isn't a riddle, and if this problem had a simple answer I suspect everyone would do it. Languages are trying different things here: Keeping access to that specialised subtraction hardware is valuable, but our brains are expensive too. We see source-code-characters, lexicographically similar but with wildly differing internals. We want the simplest possible notation and we want access to the fastest possible results. It doesn't seem like we can have it all, does it?