A small quiz question

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2017 09:12 am, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> I suppose, the two in combination imply that the calls to "f()" occur
> first in left to right, but then the "**" are applied to the returned
> values right to left -- rather than having the calls performed in the
> exponentiation order.

Standard mathematical convention is for exponentiation to be performed from
right to left:

2**3**2

should be evaluated as 

2**(3**2) = 512

rather than (2**3)**2 = 64. This is more obvious in the standard formatted
mathematical notation where each subsequent index is higher and smaller than
the previous, indicating that 2 is being raised to the power of 3 squared,
rather than 2 cubed being squared.

See, for example, the comment here:

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PowerTower.html

    where z^z^z is an abbreviation for z^(z^z)

(about a third of the way down the page).


So Python agrees with the usual maths convention here.



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.