Stephen J. Herschkorn wrote:

I suspect you are being highly disingenous here. Either that, or you
must have had a terrible time getting through high-school level
algebra. The onus is on *you* to provide one reputable source, outside
of computer manuals, where these expressions are not interpreted as I
have been maintaining.

Whether I am being highly disingenuous and whether I had difficulty with
high-school level algebra are irrelevant. It seems to me self-evident
(accepting that ^2 is equivalent to a superscript 2) that -x^2, without
an adopted convention as to the order of precedence between negation and
exponentiation, can as readily be interpreted as -(x^2) or (-x)^2; that
is, without an adopted convention, it is ambiguous.

I'm simply asking for a citation to the order of preference convention
that you have indicated is universally accepted (outside of computer
programming). Unless you are claiming that its acceptance is (and
always has been?) so universal that it has never been authoritatively
declared--even in textbooks purporting to be the basis for teaching
unfamiliar students the fundamentals of the language to be used in
high-school algebra. Onus or not, I just find it odd that a thread can
have gone on this long with noone citing a source for a universally
accepted convention, other than assertions about broad usage.

In short, where can one learn about the order of precedence of negation
and exponentiation in mathematics without having to read a slew of
algebra books to measure up common usage.

Alan Beban