As a Mathematician I would like:

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

If I had two changes I would make to the C programming language, it is

1. Put in an exponentiation operator, a^b or a**b, so that 2**3 is 8. 
For a numerics programmer this would be really useful. This is one way 
that Fortran really scores over C. I know that there is the pow function 
in C, but it always treats the power as a float or double, where if the 
power is an integer it should really work differently. Also the 
optimization should be able to do clever things with a^2 (i.e. write it 
as inline code a*a). Also, using "pow" is just plain ugly. I do 
appreciate that a^b and a**b already have meaning in C (the first is 
exclusive or, and the second is a*(*b)), but I think that this is 
sufficiently worthwhile for numerics programmers that you either find a 
whole new symbol, or depreciate the current use of ^ or ** (e.g. one 
could insist that the current a**b is always written a* *b - I mean when 
does a**b actually ever appear in real code?).

2. a%b has a very definite and unambiguous meaning when a is negative, 
and b is positive. The output should be non-negative. This is something 
perl has done right.  For example (-6)%7 is 1.



I also wrote this at the following url, but maybe this wasn't the right 
place to write it:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DocComments/Lex