>>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. ;)
>
>Amazing all the opinions on "basic" things we're just supposed to have learned in school. This has been an interesting thread to follow.
>
>Just to add fuel to the fire, here's another opinion of it:
>
>http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/53194.html

Very similar to the link I put in previously, and it says basically the same thing. Pure math - exponentiation has precedence over the unary operator, but in programming, it's often the other way around. His last paragraph is telling.

You may be interested in this page I ran across, on the order of
operations in Microsoft Excel. It says that they evaluate unary minus
before exponentiation, and will not change it though they acknowledge
that this is different from the normal order

Bold face emphasis is mine.