5.4 The power operator
The power operator binds more tightly than unary operators on its left; it binds less
tightly than unary operators on its right. The syntax is:
-
Thus, in an unparenthesized sequence of power and unary operators, the operators are
evaluated from right to left (this does not constrain the evaluation order for the
operands).
The power operator has the same semantics as the built-in pow()
function, when called with two arguments: it yields its left argument raised to the power
of its right argument. The numeric arguments are first converted to a common type. The
result type is that of the arguments after coercion.
With mixed operand types, the coercion rules for binary arithmetic operators apply. For
int and long int operands, the result has the same type as the operands (after coercion)
unless the second argument is negative; in that case, all arguments are converted to float
and a float result is delivered. For example, 10**2 returns 100,
but 10**-2 returns 0.01. (This last feature was added in Python
2.2. In Python 2.1 and before, if both arguments were of integer types and the second
argument was negative, an exception was raised).
Raising 0.0 to a negative power results in a ZeroDivisionError.
Raising a negative number to a fractional power results in a ValueError.
|
