I very much prefer the hat notation too. Also I was 
playing with isosurfaces today and in 6.5.4.2 was the
simple exapmple:

isosurface{
 function{ x^2+y^2+z^2}
}

which we apparently now have to encode as 

 function{ pow(x,2)+pow(y,2)+pow(z,2) }

see why I prefer the hat?
If the only reason to eliminate the hat is that 
there is some confusion on the precedence, please
put it back and make sure the documentation is
correct. Also Thorsten, when making such big changes
on the syntax, communicate it to the guys who do the
doc. Now you have broken a number of examples from
the documentation.

As a further note, precedence is always a difficult 
thing. There are even variations between countries.
In Holland the precedence rules are that the order
for binary operators is: ^ * / + - 
and none has the same precedence. So 2*4/2 is 4 not 1
When something unexpected happens I always check
precedence and use superfluous parenthesis, just to be
sure :)

I still think POV is one of the best programs I ever
used, so keep up the good work.

	Andrel
 

Philippe Debar wrote:
> 
> "Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
> news:3d0af371@news.povray.org...
> > In article <3d0ae109$1@news.povray.org> , "Karl J. Anders"
> > <kar### [at] webde> wrote:
> > > - removing an operator in release candidate (!) #6 (^)
> >
> > This has been removed to avoid getting complaints from people who don't
> > understand that there can be more than one way how something works.  The
> > feature used to work one way and thus we got complaints from those
> favoring
> > the other way of operation.  Changing it would have resulted in the other
> > group complaining.  Others seemed to complain just for the sake of
> > complaining and they didn't mind the original (MegaPOV) implementation not
> > working different.  As the feature is redundant anyway and was only a 3.5
> > beta addition and was not in 3.1 it has been removed because we don't want
> > to have to waste our time with endless pointless discussions how it works
> > and how some people expect it to work.
> 
> Too bad... I liked that nifty ^
> 
> I'd like to plead its case, but obviously there was already exentsive
> discussion about it and I missed it... Could anybody kindly point me to that
> discussion ? So that I might see if I have anything of value to add.
> (Probably not.)
> 
> TIA
> 
> Povingly,
> 
> Philippe

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