Minor point in this discussion of ** versus ^ for exponentiation. Some
programming languages define two forms of exponentiation, one in which the
exponent must be an integer and another in which the exponent can be a
non-integer. For the integer exponent form any exponentiation with the power
of 0 is 1, and the results for negative arguments are defined. For the second
form a faster hardware implementation, that gives arbitrary results for those
cases is allowed. In such a language having both ** and ^ as exponentiation
operators makes sense.
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