I used to be a hobbyist programmer, but now I'm also a fairly experienced physicist and find myself programming to solve certain problems quite a lot. In physics, we use variables with superscripts, subscripts, italics, underlines, etc etc. To bridge this gap to the computer we usually use LaTeX.

Now, I generally use MATLAB for handling any data and such, and find it very irritating that I can't basically use LaTeX for variable names. Something as simple as sy has to be named either sigma_y or some descriptive name like peak_height_error.

I don't necessarily want full on workable LaTeX in my code, but I do want to be able to use greek letters and super/sub-scripts at the very least. Does this exist?