That fool 'Carat' operator!

Posted: Wed Jul 03, 2002 6:55 pm (21 years, 9 months ago)

I couldn't find a better place to post this (such as a board for a specific language) because I don't know the answer to my question yet, doh! Embarassed

On a JavaScript certification test I've taken a few times, i noticed I kept missing various questions related to the 'carat' operator (i.e., ^ ). In JavaScript, it's used for XOR bitwise operations (logical 'exclusive' OR), but something in me kept wanting to use it as a 'power' (exponentiation) operator (i.e., x ^ y = x to the yth power).

I've finally gotten the ^ somewhat firmly associated w/ XOR in JavaScript, but can't, for the life of me, remember in which (if any) language it's used for exponentiation. I tried searching online for its usage in different languages for exponentiation, but it's taking too long I'm afraid. So far, I've found it used for XOR in C ... Sad

There must be some programmers out there who already know/remember this! Wink

Posted: Wed Jul 03, 2002 10:04 pm (21 years, 9 months ago)

what are u on about me confussed Crying or Very sad

WebHelper Joined: 08 Jan 2002 Posts: 69 Location: Ireland

Well I can confirm that it isn't used by Perl or PHP or C or C++ or Java.

Yeah this is beginning to get to me too.

By the way, as the Mathematician that I am, I must clarify the difference betweem exponentiation and power. Exponent is 3 X 10**-4. Power is simply 3**-4

Where ** stands for power of.

Garth Farley

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Well, actually, I'm sure I've seen ^ used in Perl scripts... Smile

For example, when you configure an email address in FormMail, there's a ^ in front of it.

WebHelper Joined: 08 Jan 2002 Posts: 69 Location: Ireland

Daniel wrote:

Well, actually, I'm sure I've seen ^ used in Perl scripts... Smile

Oh yeah, the carat is used for XORing bits in a few languages, as well as Perl RegExps.

Garth Farley

Posted: Fri Jul 05, 2002 2:45 pm (21 years, 9 months ago)

Garth wrote:

"Oh yeah, the carat is used for XORing bits in a few languages, as well as Perl RegExps."

Well you're right on that, and thanks for the bit about exponentiation (i'm beginning to think that this's maybe one reason i never felt right about logarithms when i took math in High School -- i never really got down the differences in all the terminology. Sure, logs are really the same as exponents -- or are they? Embarassed

)

i think i got the answer i was looking for at another site where i posted this. The server for it's down at the moment, so i can't post the replies, but one was to the effect that ^ is used for power ops in sed and VBS (which i think maybe is the same as VBScript?).

Some of my earliest programming was done in a version of Quick Basic that Microsoft sold as an IDE back in the mid-80's before they started bundling a pared-down version of it with MS-DOS, and i'm still guessing that this's where i got that usage from. I haven't confirmed this yet for Quick Basic or Sed (which i think actually uses it in RegExps in same way as Perl), but here's what i found online for VBScript:

Quote:

"The ^ operator, which is sometimes called "hat", is used to raise a number to a power."

WebHelper Joined: 08 Jan 2002 Posts: 69 Location: Ireland

I thought that was ** in Perl and PHP. Not C anyway, it needs the pow() function. No idea about Java. So it must be different for each language.

Garth Farley

Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2002 11:28 pm (21 years, 9 months ago)

well thanks for thinking about it, Garth Smile