issue 7006 - std.math.pow (integral, integral) crashes on negative exponents

[Dominikus Dittes Scherkl]

On Monday, 16 December 2019 at 03:20:32 UTC, mipri wrote:
> You expect some specific behavior of pow(), but what do you
> expect of functions like pow in general? What principle does
> pow() violate by having this weirdly implemented domain
> restriction? Would you be satisfied if the line were changed to
>
>   enforce(n >= 0, "only natural powers are supported");
>
> or
>
>   assert(n >= 0);
>
> or
>
>   @deprecated("use floating point pow instead")

In this special case, I would think changing the function 
signature to take only "uint" as exponent would be sufficient. If 
you need negative exponents using the floating point pow is more 
useful anyway.

Of course -1^^x is a useful function, but if you need it, I would 
still think using floating point makes more sense. And if its 
time critical and you need only integers, there are much faster 
solutions than using pow (e.g. odd(x)?-1:1 )