Alfred calculator: negative exponent bug

[sudopeople]

When executing negative exponents in parenthesis numbers are often inconsistent. I guess it could be the notation's way of interpreting order of operations but I'd expect all of these to work the same way. At the very least, I'd expect the first screenshot here to be correct, ie. -2 to the power of 4 should equal 16.

 

Not sure if this helps, but it could be that the interpreter is evaluating the negative sign as a subtraction operator and putting precedence on the exponent operation first. ie. it's trying to respect PEMDAS but the negative symbol should not be treated an operator, per se. It should applied to any int/float directly following it before executing operations in normal PEMDAS order.

 

In case anyone's not familiar with the acronym:

Parenthesis

Exponents

Multiplication

Division

Addition

Subtraction

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2021 by sudopeople

[Andrew]

@sudopeople Take a look here:

 

https://socratic.org/questions/what-is-the-difference-between-2-4-and-2-4

 

A negative sign prior to a number is not included in the base of an exponent unless specified using parentheses.

 

If you type your given examples into Google for calculation, you'll get the same results.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[sudopeople]

Ahh, thanks very much. I did put some examples into Google, but I must have switch some of them or something. And thanks for the math lesson. 🙏🏻