So your argument is that subtraction and negation are the same thing. Perl does not agree with you. They are not next to each other in the precedence table.

Negation is ranked above multiplication while subtraction is ranked below. This means that
-2*3 is evaluated as (-2)*3
while
0-2*3 is evaluated as 0-(2*3)
I cannot think of any practical circumstance where this would lead to a different answer!

I have just been chatting to a mathematician about this and we agreed that the reason we would expect -2**3 to mean (-2)**3 is that we do not think of unary negation as a operation at all. Rather, we think of "-2" as a number.

In reply to Re: Re: Operator Precedence (unary negation and exponentiation) by Elliott
in thread Operator Precedence (unary negation and exponentiation) by Elliott

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