Re: Question about exponent shorthand
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg83839] Re: Question about exponent shorthand
- From: Szabolcs Horvát <szhorvat at gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 04:07:00 -0500 (EST)
- References: <firds9$rhc$1@smc.vnet.net>
Curtis Osterhoudt wrote: > Hi, all, > > I've just got used to using the character shortcut *^ to stand for "times > 10 to the power of". As expected, these two expressions work: > 1*^5 --> 100000 > 1*^-5 --> 1/100000 > > But putting parentheses around the exponent (as I'd prefer to do for > readability) leads to > > Input: 1*^ (-5) > > Output: Syntax::sntxb:Expression cannot begin with "1.(-5)". > > Syntax::tsntxi:"1.^" is incomplete; more input is needed. > > Syntax::sntxi:Incomplete expression; more input is needed. > > > This is on > > In[45]:= $Version > > Out[45]= "6.0 for Linux x86 (32-bit) (June 19, 2007)" I think that this is because *^ is not an operator, but part of the number, like in C and some other languages. E.g. in C 1e-5 cannot be written as 1e(-5). For readability, one could write 5 10^5, as Mathematica 6 automatically replaces the space denoting the multiplication with a cross. Unfortunately this seems to be buggy: the replacement does not happen when ^5 is written as a superscript (CTRL-6 5). -- Szabolcs