I think once someone wrote a list (a 1D array), it was pretty inevitable it would turn into a 2D array within a week or a month. But it took what, another 4000 years for people to start writing arrays of 3 dimensions or more? And then within a couple centuries we got tensors, and the arrays are too big to check.
I was just saying that pretty much no one ever did it (that I'm aware of) before a machine came along to read and write that notation. I might be wrong. I'd love to see an example of 3+d arrays written as musical notation or something from the 16th Century.
