It's been too long since I played with languages that used ** for powers,
but my recollection is that A could be a floating point value.

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"Chuck" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 6 Oct 2008 11:43:51 -0400, "Rick Rothstein"
wrote:

It's been a (long, long) while since I looked at Turbo Pascal, but I
thought
it used what Fortran (also been a long, long while since I looked at this
also) used for powers... the double asterisk symbol. I would have thought
your VB example of X^A would have been X**A in Turbo Pascal.

It's possible. I never tried that. Would "A" have to be an integer?
What I
did was to look at the source code for a program that I knew raised
numbers to
non integer powers: X^2.1342. That program used the natural log
function. I
still think that some version of BASIC does not use ^. Wasn't there a
version
of BASIC that could compile the code to an .exe file?

Over time I wrote programs in 8 to 10 different versions of BASIC.
Programs
written in one version would not run in another. The strangest case was
when
we up graded a HP computer to the next model (like model 1 to model 2) and
the
code written in the model 1 would not run in model 2. It was usually a
just
single command. You just had to find what and where.