It's not symbol soup, it's projective coordinates. Did you claim to be a mathematician? I merely have a PhD in Mathematics and a few papers in peer-review journals, so, unlike you, not a real mathematician, and I immediately understood the point.
Uh... I have a PhD, I'm a tenured professor, and I even supervise a couple of PhD students. How about you? Given your snarky tone, it sounds like you'd have mentioned something like this. Not sure why you'd try to flex when you don't know much about me ;)
With my font, the letter l looked like a vertical bar |. Hence why this looked like symbol soup. But okay, let's say it's about projective spaces. Then surely, you realize that the equal sign still denotes equality. The point [1:2] is literally equal to [2:4] in P^2, not "proportional". Perhaps you need a refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_class#quotient_set