negative number raised to even power

[kharpster]

I found this thread interesting for two reasons. The first of which is that it is device (or emulator) dependent as to which answer you will receive when raising negative numbers to an even power. And, the second is the variety of old calculators that some of the members of this board have in their inventory.

I used this thread as a teaching moment with my son, who is in his first year of High School and will be using an HP prime going forward. I think we can all agree that in so far as this topic is concerned the safest thing to do going forward is to assume that the order of operations will be followed by a calculator, and therefore enter any equations using negative numbers in this context within parentheses (the obvious exception is RPN).

Now if they would just cover this topic even briefly in the classroom...