Pow operator precedence

[Alvaro]

El 13/01/2012 21:29, bearophile escribió:
> Bioinformatics, exploratory programing, simulations, data munging, hardening of slow scripts, data visualization, data mining, optimization of some tasks, faster routines for dynamic code written by other people, and more.
>
> The problem is that often you don't have a "x", but a "long_named_variable", ...
 > ...
>> Realistically, how often do you cube? It's extremely rare in my experience.
>
> ^^3 is not common.


I completely agree. The ^^ operator is a great addition in D even if it 
is not used very often. I always found awkward the lack of such operator 
in C-derived languages (some others use either ^ or **). And I was happy 
to see in the DMD source how ^^2 and ^^3 are rewritten to avoid pow().

There are indeed applications that use exponentiation and whose 
expressions using ^^ are much more readable and closer to the 
mathematical notation.

e.g. sphere_volume = 4./3 * PI * radius^^3; // so much better


As for the original discussion on precedence I think the first example 
is different to the others posted in that it uses a *number literal*.

in -x^^2, following standard math, it should be -(x^^2) (<0)

but the first example, -10^^2 is confusing because one might quickly see 
the - sign as part of the number literal. As long as in D the - sign is 
not part of the literal, the current behavior is fine. If you want it 
the other way around write:

(-10)^^2