Alan,

I specifically stayed away from precedence rules in my post to keep from clouding the most simplistic issue of people not seeing in the original post that the operand is the number negative two.

>But in all that, you forgot the part about when they made up rules so that everybody would get the same results on the same operations.
>
>5+7*2
>
>24 or 19? If we don't follow the rules as laid down, we get different results. The rules as laid down say that -2^2 is -4. You feel intuitively that this is wrong, Ok, that's fine (the fact is it bothers my intuition too), but if we don't all follow the rules, we end up getting different results to the same equations.