Harlan Grove wrote:

"Jerry W. Lewis" wrote...

Lance Lamboy wrote:
...

I checked my copy of oocalc. (I don't use M$ products.) Much to my
chagrin it exhibited the same Excel bug.

Historically speaking, I wouldn't put the blame on Microsoft. You can
download a working copy of the original release of VisiCalc from
http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm
and verify that it worked the same way. I presume that all subsequent
versions of VisiCalc used the same order of operator precedence to avoid
breaking existing applications. I do not have access to a version of
Lotus, but I presume that they utilized the same order of operator
precedence to make it easier for people to switch from VisiCalc to
Lotus. . . .


And you'd be wrong! In 123, -3^2 returns -9.

Interesting and surprising. Thanks for the information.

Jerry