a**b exponentiation

[Bill Baxter]

Leandro Lucarella wrote:
> davidb, el  3 de julio a las 20:33 me escribiste:
>>>> And I rather like the other proposed operator: ^^
>>>> Should be more clear, and more familiar since some languages already use '^' to mean power -- so 
>>>> long as it doesn't get confused with our existing '^' operator...
>>> I also like "^^", but "**" does have some history - I think it is used in FORTRAN.
>> Gnuplot uses "**" as well.
> 
> And Python.
> 

I kinda like ^^, because it looks like the smiley faces Japanese folks 
make instead of the sideways things...

But logic and consistency kinda dictates that ^^ should be logical xor 
since we have:

& - bitwise and   && - logical and
| - bitwise or    || - logical or
^ - bitwise xor   ^^ - ??

whereas ** is like "multiply-multiplied" which is sort of what 
exponentiation is.

--bb