Walter Bright wrote:
Don wrote:
A little while ago I said I'd create a patch for ^^ as an
exponentiation. A couple of people had requested that I make a post to
the ng so they'd know when it happens. Here it is.
This is opPow(), x ^^ y
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3481
I don't understand the rationale for an exponentiation operator. It
isn't optimization, because pow() could become an intrinsic that the
compiler knows about. pow() is well known, ^^ isn't. (Fortran uses **)
It's primarily about syntax sugar: pow() is so ugly. In practice, the
most important case is squaring, which is an extremely common operation.
pow(xxx,2) is horribly ugly for something so fundamental. It's so ugly
that noone uses it: you always change it to xxx * xxx. But then, xxx
gets evaluated twice.
Yes, ^^ hasn't been used for exponentiation before. Fortran used **
because it had such a limited character set, but it's not really a
natural choice; the more mathematically-oriented languages use ^.
Obviously C-family languages don't have that possibility.
