proposed syntax change

[bearophile]

Don:
> so there's nothing else you'd want to use ^^ for.
> People would get used to it pretty quickly. I think it looks better than 
> Fortran's **, actually.  double y = x^^2;

I have asked for a power operator lot of time ago, in one of my first long lists of suggestions.

^^ isn't standard in other languages (they usually use ** or ^), but it looks nice enough, and it doesn't look hard to understand or learn.
I'd like it to perform integral exponentiation if both operands are integral, and double/real exponentiation in the other cases.
In mathematics ^^ is sometimes used for Tetration, but it's not a problem, it's not a common operation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration
So this looks like a good idea.

The front-end *must* be able to translate x ^^ 2 and x ^^ 3 into x*x and x*x*x, that are faster than any other kind of operation (Python doesn't do this simple operation, and a power operation done in the middle of a critical loop can slow down the code, I have seen this in my Python code).
(x ^^ 4 can be simplified into y = x*x; y*y, but this is a less common operation).

I guess the way to overload this operator is named opPower(). So for example if A is a user-defined matrix you can write:
auto B = A ^^ 2;

Bye,
bearophile