JimB,

I was going to introduce an odd power example yesterday but it doesn't prove anything one way or the other because they'd just say the negative result was because of a negation operation applied to the exponentiation result... I was also thinking about a negative power ie 2 ^ -2 but concluded that wouldn't illustrate it either.

We can blame google for elevating incorrect pages to the top of the search result.

>I have spent some time on the google path finding all sorts of conflicting information about the precedence of unary signs, but it still comes down to the simple fact that -2 squared is 4
>not -4. Makes no difference what the precedence of the operations are -2 * -2 is 4 and I woudl therefore conclude that -2^3 is -8 as it is -2 * -2 = 4 * -2 = -8.