Proposal: Constant expression - Power operator?

Disclaimer: I don’t know if it’s worthy of a proposal but it’s really a tiny feature and some people might have some interest in it.

Currently, there are three ways to raise a number to a power:

1. Using left shift but this only works when raising 2 to a power.
2. Using plain multiplications.
3. Using Math.Pow(2, 3) or Pow(2, 3) but it’s not a constant expression.

So what I’m proposing is a power operator much like it exists in Python or JavaScript ** but this one will be evaluated at compile time unless it can’t because the base or the power are non-constant.

The motivation for this is mainly to allow us represent some formulas in their natural/symbolic/mathematical way, I wish we could have constexpr in C# but this is another story. 😃

[MgSam]

It seems to me like people ask about this kind of stuff a lot- evaluate math at compile time, strings at compile time. Seems like a general purpose feature that allowed running statically known values through static methods at compile time would be a better idea.

[iam3yal]

This feature is already discussed at #4594.