It's basically declaring operator precedence - saying "we're going to write things this way so we don't need so many parentheses". It's fairly analogous to wri

It's basically declaring operator precedence - saying "we're going to write things this way so we don't need so many parentheses". It's fairly analogous to writing sin^2 x for (sin x)^2, a notation which the intended audience is probably used to. (Although that notation creates its own trouble when you have sin^(-1) x ...)