https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114929

--- Comment #26 from [email protected] ---
[Gnumeric maintainer here]

FYI, the Gnumeric solution to this lies in the code that serialises an
expression parse tree.   Specifically Gnumeric adds '(' ... ')' around
the left operand when that operand would otherwise start with a '-' or '+'.
It's a 5 line change, 15 with comments.

This was chosen such that (1) it makes what happens clear, (2) existing
files do not change semantics, and (3) XL compatibility is maintained.
(I'm not saying (3) is a great reason, just that it was on the list of
considerations 20 years ago.)

The change reduced a persistent trickle of bug reports to nothing.

A reasonable interpretation is that the problem experienced by users is
not so much that the precedence of unary minus versus exponentiation is
unexpected, but that the ui's lack of current feedback makes the problem
hard to discover.  And thus leads to wasted debug time.

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