"fred" wrote in message
...
I did in another sub-thread. Dana was familiar with it already.

If you lead off with a negative sign it uses the negative value inside the
exponentiation.
So, instead of =-5^2 equalling -25 it equals 25.
but, =0-5^2 is calculated correctly as -25 even though it's mathematically
the same.


The error is yours

The standard parsing of =-5^2
is -5 * -5

multiplying 2 negative numbers always gives a positive

The acronym to remember is BODMAS

What you should have specified is
=-(5^2)

Keith




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