The increasing use of simple computing languages in schools gives an opportunity for rationalisation of our existing mathematical notation as follows:

It is time we abandoned “÷”, which is used in primary schools and causes great difficulties later on when children have to cope with the fact that or, worse still, If we used “|” from the start, what could be easier than (Nor is there a case for restricting ÷ to ‘sharing’ situations, since + and − are used for both natural numbers and rationals.)