negative number raised to even power

[Dave Britten]

I'm of the opinion that the negation sign is a part of the number itself, not an operation, and thus -2^2 = 4. Yes, you can say that -2 = 0 - 2, but you can also say that 2.5 = 2 + .5, and 2.5^2 isn't 2.25, is it?

In CS terms, fully parsing a numeric literal is atomic, and precedes any operations on that number.