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

[Johannes Loher]

On Monday, 16 December 2019 at 06:44:31 UTC, Dominikus Dittes 
Scherkl wrote:
> [...] And if its time critical and you need only integers, 
> there are much faster solutions than using pow (e.g. 
> odd(x)?-1:1 )

The thing is: In math, it is extremely common to write this as 
(-1)^^x. I don‘t understand why we should not allow this 
notation. As Timon explained, the restriction just makes no sense 
and was not what he had expected (I am also very surprised by 
this). I admit that Timon’s explanations sounded a bit harsh, but 
that does not makes them any less true. This is simply an 
arbitrary limitation. The definition of pow in math can be 
perfectly adapted to integers by simply using integer division, 
i.e. 2^^(-1) == 0, so this is how it should work.