>>Ok, I get it now. The unary operator takes precedence over exponentiation because..... you want it to? I tried that philosophy out when I was in school in hopes of perfect scores on everything. Oddly, it didn't work out that way. ;)
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>No Alan, the designers of the language (VFP in this case) wanted it that way. Some other languages might implement a different order of precedence and then some other languages get rid of the problem by using a different notation altogether, like RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). The trick is to learn the rules of the language you are using, something that will be very clear if your language of choice was using RPN :)

Except that I'm not talking about any programming languages. I'm talking about the rules of Mathematics - which state that the unary operator is a substitute for multiplication, and exponentiation takes precedence.