>> I think you answered your own question. 3**2 comes first in the order >> of operations, followed by the negation. > > No, that's not the problem, I'm ok with the operator precedence of - vs ** > > My problem is why I don't get the same result if I use the literal -3 or > a variable that contains -3 (x in my example).
There is no literal -3 in Python, only a literal (+)3, see http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#integer-and-long-integer-literals So -3**2 means -(3**2) == -9. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
