I believe that unary negation has a lower precedence than exponentiation. I think it is included in the rules for binary operations so it is not spelled out in PEMDAS.

I don't think we can go by any programming language's rules of precendence because each language determines its own and it doesn't always match that of math .

For example, -4^2 = -(4^2) = -16 NOT (-4)^2 = 16

That's from my daughter's math worksheets :o) So, if it is wrong, blame her teacher or the math books her teacher used :o)


>Alan,
>
>Unary negation does have higher precedence than exponentiation! It also represents a subtraction from 0.
>
>You can't believe everything you read on the internet.
>
>>No David. In normal math, the unary operator does not have precedence because it actually represents a multiplication by -1. In other words, -2**2 is the same as saying -1*2**2 and since exponentiation takes precedence over multiplication, the correct answer is -4. For the record, I thought it was 4 at first too.
>>
>>Check this out: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/69058.html