engineers' notation. So the notation, according to which one writes "" when the natural logarithm is intended, may have been further popularized by the very invention that made the use of "common logarithms" far less common, electronic calculators.

To mitigate the ambiguity, the ISO 80000 specification recommends that should be , while should be written , which unfortunately is used for the base-2 logarithm by CLRS and Sedgwick and The Chicago Manual of Style.