[Rd] Multiplication (PR#8466)

[Peter Dalgaard]

Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> writes:

> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, casella at stat.ufl.edu wrote:
> 
> > hi - in version 2.1 the command
> >
> > >-2^2
> >
> > gives
> >
> > -4
> >
> > as the answer.  (-2)^2 is evaluated correctly.
> 
> So is -2^2.  The precedence of ^ is higher than that of unary minus. It 
> may be surprising, but it *is* documented and has been in S for a long 
> time.

Pretty much standard too, for languages that have an exponentiation
operator. AFAICS Fortran, Perl, SAS all have ** at higher precedence
than unary minus (or equal, but evaluate right to left). Stata seems
like it might be the exception.

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