There's no regular engineering convention about the ^ exponentiation operator, because there is no exponentiation operator in regular or engineering math notati

There's no regular engineering convention about the ^ exponentiation operator, because there is no exponentiation operator in regular or engineering math notation. The superscript used for exponentiation doesn't need a precedence level, it has a natural grouping behvaior. This is most visible in the fact that you never need parentheses around an exponent expression in math notation, but you need them a lot in programming notation. They are just different notations. Consider in math notation: 2+2 3 + 5 Programming notation: 3^(2+2)+5 Completely different notations in a much more fundamental way than how they treat unary minus.