I agree. To clarify, its not that the reader gets confused between the gas constant and the set of real numbers. The issue is never actually explicitly stating "R represents the set of real numbers" or "n is a natural number".

At uni it once took me hours to work out that "." was used for function application in one particular paper. "." was also used for multiplication and (in some example code) had the usual object oriented meaning in the same paper. It was incredibly frustrating.