Exponentiation - in Programming Languages

In Programming Languages

The superscript notation xy is convenient in handwriting but inconvenient for typewriters and computer terminals that align the baselines of all characters on each line. Many programming languages have alternate ways of expressing exponentiation that do not use superscripts:

  • x ↑ y: Algol, Commodore BASIC
  • x ^ y: BASIC, J, MATLAB, R, Microsoft Excel, TeX (and its derivatives), TI-BASIC, bc (for integer exponents), Haskell (for nonnegative integer exponents), Lua, ASP and most computer algebra systems
  • x ^^ y: Haskell (for fractional base, integer exponents), D
  • x ** y: Ada, Bash, COBOL, Fortran, FoxPro, Gnuplot, OCaml, Perl, PL/I, Python, Rexx, Ruby, SAS, Seed7, Tcl, ABAP, Haskell (for floating-point exponents), Turing, VHDL
  • x⋆y: APL

Many programming languages lack syntactic support for exponentiation, but provide library functions.

In Bash, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, the symbol ^ represents bitwise XOR. In Pascal, it represents indirection. In OCaml and Standard ML, it represents string concatenation.

Read more about this topic:  Exponentiation

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