There's no regular engineering convention about the ^ exponentiation operator, because there is no exponentiation operator in regular or engineering math notation. The superscript used for exponentiation doesn't need a precedence level, it has a natural grouping behvaior.
This is most visible in the fact that you never need parentheses around an exponent expression in math notation, but you need them a lot in programming notation. They are just different notations.
Consider in math notation:
2+2
3 + 5
Programming notation:
3^(2+2)+5
Completely different notations in a much more fundamental way than how they treat unary minus.
This is most visible in the fact that you never need parentheses around an exponent expression in math notation, but you need them a lot in programming notation. They are just different notations.
Consider in math notation:
Programming notation: Completely different notations in a much more fundamental way than how they treat unary minus.