Pow operator precedence

[Manu]

On 13 January 2012 21:24, Grue <Grue at nop.com> wrote:

> **
>
>
>  The logic is that the precedence in the language matches the
>> precedence of a written equation.
>>
>
> But the operator looks nothing like the written equation... nothing at all
> like the written equation.
> Perhaps D could support the unicode characters '²' '³' or 'ª' as kinda
> handy operators. But to me, the operator looks NOTHING like maths notation,
> and it would never have occurred to me that the operator was trying to
> emulate maths notation (and by extension, its precedence rules).
> I'd be interested to see a poll, and how many people see it one way or the
> other...
>
>
> Beware... your statement has awoken an "Ancient Forum Lurker"! ;)
>

Sweet! I have that effect :P


> 1. Google -5^2, result: -(5^2) = -25
> 2. Start ancient TI graphing calculator(which by the way has a special
> unary (-) minus operator).
> -5^2 = -25
> -5*²* = -25
>
> The list can be extended by a great number of examples of prior convention
> for the pow operator(especially in mathemathical software)... not just
> Python... I have actually never even seen a valid counter example...
> changing this would greatly confuse people with mathematical background.
>

In my prior post I agreed, though that said, I still maintain that none of
those exampled look sufficiently like -5 ^^ 2 by my mind to be considered
'the same thing'. The single ^ and your not using spaces on either side
distinguish it quite clearly...
If it weren't for participation in this debate, I would have never
clarified this in my mind personally, I can say that with confidence.
The ^ xor operator was already taken. Promotion of a 'common' (arguable...)
function to an operator can only be justified by improving code clarity...
I don't think there's any evidence that it does that.

It's funny, I've written a lot of maths code (mostly physics and/or
rendering/lighting), but I can probably count the number of times I've used
pow() on one hand. I use sqrt(), but I think that's a fairly well
established subset of pow(), and people would never use ^^ to perform a
sqrt. A function of that rarity possibly doesn't warrant a custom operator
:)

>
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