What's the Difference Between Bitwise XOR and the Power Operator in C/C ?

Bitwise XOR vs. Power Operator

When working with C/C , programmers often encounter the "^" operator. However, in these languages, "^" represents the bitwise XOR operation, not exponentiation. If you intend to calculate the power of a number, you should utilize the pow() function from the library.

For instance, the following code aims to calculate the sum of the powers of a number (a) from 1 to 4. However, it employs the bitwise XOR operator instead of the power operator:

#include <stdio.h>

void main(void)
{
    int a;
    int result;
    int sum = 0;
    printf("Enter a number: ");
    scanf("%d", &a);
    for( int i = 1; i <= 4; i++ )
    {
        result = a ^ i;

        sum += result;
    }
    printf("%d\n", sum);
}

As you can see, the ^ operator will perform bitwise XOR operations between a and i (1 to 4) instead of raising a to the power of i. To obtain the desired power calculation, you need to use the pow() function like so:

result = (int) pow((double) a,i);

Casting one of the arguments to double and the result to int is necessary because pow() overloads return double, not int. Additionally, C99 provides powf and powl functions for float and long double calculations, respectively.

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