Exponentiation Operator

Specification

Status

Stage 4

Implementation Progress

• Traceur
• Babel
• V8 (https://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=3915)
• SpiderMonkey (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135708)

Authors

• Rick Waldron
• Claude Pache
• Brendan Eich

Reviewers

• Brian Terlson
• Erik Arvidsson
• Dmitry Lomov
• Cait Potter
• Jason Orendorff
• Waldemar Horwat

Informative

• Commonly used in mathematics, physics and robotics.
• Infix notation is more succinct than function notation, which makes it more preferable

Prior Art

• Python
  • math.pow(x, y)
  • x ** y
• CoffeeScript
  • x ** y
• F#
  • x ** y
• Ruby
  • x ** y
• Perl
  • x ** y
• Lua, Basic, MATLAB, etc.
  • x ^ y

Usage

// x ** y

let squared = 2 ** 2;
// same as: 2 * 2

let cubed = 2 ** 3;
// same as: 2 * 2 * 2

// x **= y

let a = 2;
a **= 2;
// same as: a = a * a;



let b = 3;
b **= 3;
// same as: b = b * b * b;

Render Spec

ecmarkup spec/index.html index.html