On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Hmmm, it appears that ** is a no-op that always returns its left hand > argument: > > py> -1**12 > -1
Ahh but you see, you misunderstand how the whole negative-numbers thing works. You have your syntax wrong. Python was developed by an accountant, and you write negative numbers like this: >>> (1)**12 1 And then, because you're raising it to an even power, you get back positive one. The hyphen is actually an alignment operator, and it means "left-align this value". https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0461/ https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting :) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list