information:filtering, stylistic:style_transfer
Serial exponentiation

If exponentiation is indicated by stacked symbols using superscript notation, the usual rule is to work from the top down:

which typically is not equal to (a). This convention is useful because there is a property of exponentiation that (a) = a, so it's unnecessary to use serial exponentiation for this.

However, when exponentiation is represented by an explicit symbol such as a caret (^) or arrow (↑), there is no common standard. For example, Microsoft Excel and computation programming language MATLAB evaluate a ^ b ^ c as (a), but Google Search and Wolfram Alpha as a. Thus 4^3^2 is evaluated to 4,096 in the first case and to 262,144 in the second case.