Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Alexandre Vassalotti schrieb:

...

C doesn't have an exponentiation operator. You use the pow() function, instead:

Right. Then Scott's claim ("Because it is consistent with C's precedence rules.") can't be true - from C precedence, it does not follow that ** must have higher precedence than unary -.

I believe the confusion with my claim is that I thought the oddity in question was that -3/2 != 0-3/2, but I believe you took the other half about exponentiation as the oddity in question that -3**2 == -(3**2). My original comment was to say that unary - was higher precedence than division because of C's ordering. With respect to the original question, then my answer was poor as I ignored the exponentiation part. Since we tacked this on, my answer was to be an implicit zen answer of "because it makes the most sense." Sorry for the added noise. -Scott -- Scott Dial scott@scottdial.com scodial@cs.indiana.edu