raise x to y where y is negative and with decimals

Question

This gives an error:

X <- -3.3
Y <- -2.2
X^Y  ## NaN

Am I wrong? Is it not possible to raise a value to a negative decimal value?

Answer 1

You can do:

complex(real = x, imaginary = 0) ^ y
[1] 0.05850958-0.0425097i

As suggested by @9769953

Answer 2

@Clemsang's answer with complex(...) is fine, but you can also do this more compactly via (X+0i)^Y; because R's parser recognizes <number>i as an imaginary value, adding 0i to a numeric quantity makes it complex-valued with Im(.) == 0.