built-in pow() vs. math.pow()

[Oscar Benjamin]

On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 17:31, Andreas Eisele <andreas.eisele at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I sometimes make use of the fact that the built-in pow() function has an optional third argument for modulo calculation, which is handy when dealing with tasks from number theory, very large numbers, problems from Project Euler, etc. I was unpleasantly surprised that math.pow() does not have this feature, hence "from math import *" overwrites the built-in pow() function with a function that lacks functionality. I am wondering for the rationale of this. Does math.pow() do anything that the built-in version can not do, and if not, why is it even there?

It is useful for when you want the pure floating point power which has
an approximately fixed computational cost (unlike integer powers).
Perhaps it would have been better if it was named fpow similar to fsum
vs sum.

--
Oscar