Unary minus precedence preference

[John R]

(07-22-2014 07:56 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  There is no proof. It's a convention.

That said, it's a very useful convention, symbolically speaking. It seems that if one chose the opposite convention, making \(-2^2=4\), then consistency would demand that \(-x^2=x^2\) for all \(x\). Algebraic expressions would then be fraught with many more parentheses than we are used to, with \(-(x^2)\) being the expression required to denote the negation of \(x^2\), for instance.