Methinks that you have taken Robert Frost's road not taken (leading to the law), only to look back at the other road that led towards the appealing elegance of manipulating other powerful ideas represented by a few of the thousands of symbols that fall within mathematical notation. Oh the strained cry of the humble lawyer, unable to even claim the use of a simple exclamation mark!

However, there is a payback (of sorts). Punctuation marks, even odd ones, have been incorporated into the feature sets of word processors fairly easily (as you have noted). Pity the poor mathematician who must deal with thousands of special characters as well as upper and lower cases, myriad types of brackets as well as trying to represent complicated numerators and denominators properly given the unpredictability of formatting even in today's word processing systems.

Makes one wish for the simplicity of a pencil and pad!

Cheers,

Dave

"On March 1 the plaintiff wanted an extra 45 tablets of Darvon alleging that she had lost her prescription down the toilet. Dr. Wong's reaction to this is evidenced by two exclamation marks."

http://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bcsc/doc/1993/1993canlii1318/1993canlii1318.html