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Re: Minus-Hyphen, Numeric Negation and Subtraction
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Re: Minus-Hyphen, Numeric Negation and Subtraction


  • Subject: Re: Minus-Hyphen, Numeric Negation and Subtraction
  • From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 01:46:14 -0400

> (I was taught, in school, that -2^2 was a negative number but that's another
> question.)

I could have sworn we just had a long thread about this very topic
mere months ago.

Well, I doubt you were taught anything about "-2^2" in school. :)
What you were taught that "-2²" is a negative number.  It's clearer
with superscripts; the ambiguity jumps out when you have an operator
for exponentiation instead.

Anyway, yes, the standard in mathematical notation is that it means
"-(2²)", not "(-2)²".  This is a fine rule, but it is also arbitrary,
and since exponentiation is not as common an operation as addition and
multiplication, it's also less well-known than My Dear Aunt Sally -
and therefore less widely implemented.

It's true that the major proglangs that have infix exponentiation
operators at all agree with your math teacher: Awk, Basic, Fortran,
Lua, Pascal, Perl, Python, and Ruby all give -4.  On the other hand,
Microsoft Excel (and compatible spreadsheet programs) gives +4, as do
the UNIX basic calculator program bc(1), the built-in arithmetic in
the bash and Korn shells, and the Rexx programming language,  So
AppleScript is in the minority here, but hardly alone.

--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: Minus-Hyphen, Numeric Negation and Subtraction
      • From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: Same code gives different answers in 2 different scripts (From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>)
 >Re: Minus-Hyphen, Numeric Negation and Subtraction (From: Chris Page <email@hidden>)

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