The ** (power) operator raises a number to a power, which can be positive, negative, or 0. The power must be a whole number and is rounded to DIGITS digits, if necessary, as described in Section 10.5, “Whole Numbers”. If negative, the absolute value of the power is used, and the result is inverted (that is, the number 1 is divided by the result). For calculating the power, instead of multiplying the number by itself for the number of times expressed by the power, a more efficient exponentiation by squaring algorithm is used, which requires far fewer multiplications. The result of these multiplications is inverted for negative power values, rounded to NUMERIC DIGITS digits, if necessary, and trailing zeros are then removed as though the result were divided by 1.