Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!necntc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Power (Re: all those :-)
Message-ID: <2334@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 20 Jan 88 01:14:59 GMT
References: <302@Aragorn.dde.uucp>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 21

In article <302@Aragorn.dde.uucp> be@dde.uucp (Bjorn Engsig) writes:
>[why he believes a power operator is a bad idea, and apparently that
>exponentiation in general should be avoided]

I'm only concerned with integral exponents, since the floating-point case is
already covered by the standard function pow().

>If you need to calculate x ** n (fortran notation), you will most often need
>x ** (n-1) etc. as well

If you need to calculate x *^ n (proposed C notation), it is highly likely
that n is a small compile-time constant, and that x *^ (n-1) is not of
interest.

>... Thus: Power with integer exponent is not needed!

More precisely, *^ is not needed for the application you're thinking of.  But
it sure would be useful to be able to write (expr *^ 2) instead of the ugly
mess with temp variables that C currently requires.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint