note 34193 deleted from function.pow by hholzgra

Note Submitter: bishop ---- A couple of points on pow(): 1. One of the official examples of pow(2,8) is not pragmatic; use 1 << 8 as it's substantially faster 2. When passing variables to pow(), cast them otherwise you might get warnings on some versions of PHP 3. All the rules of algebra apply: b**(-e) is 1/(b**e), b**(p/q) is the qth root of b**p So, e.g., sqrt($x) === pow($x, .5); but sqrt() is faster.