Re: Re: power operator (again)

Maybe this is because my educational background is in Mathematics but personally, I would tend to assume first (with just about any language- unless I had reason to believe otherwise) that - blah is equivalent to - (blah). FWIW, - 3 ** 2 === (-3) ** 2 would seem very counter intuitive to me and I would probably gripe to myself about an odd choice of operation syntax. This particularly makes sense given Rasmus's example. The function function blah($argument){ return 3 - $blah ** 2 } Should not by default reverse the sign of $blah as the suggested syntax might suggest. Again, just my thought. On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf <rasmus@lerdorf.com> wrote: > On 12/19/2013 04:50 PM, Kris Craig wrote: >> I believe that, especially for a KISS language like PHP, our top priority >> with math operators should be to match arithmetic laws as closely and as >> intuitively as possible. The average PHP developer is going to do -3 ** 2 >> and expect a result of 9, not -9, and rightly so I think. > > No, the average PHP developer is going to do $var ** 2 and it will > behave exactly as they expect with negative values. Yes, in the very > rare case that someone for some reason hardcodes a negative literal > there, they are going to have to learn about operator precedence because > we really can't have 0 - 3**2 be different from - 3**2. > > -Rasmus > > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php >