Exponentiation with Negative Bases in DolphinDB

Question

As shown in the following script, I want to raise all elements of x to the power of y.

x=[-3,-2,3,3,3,4]
y=[1/3.0,0.334,0.334,1/3,1/3.0,2]
pow(x,y)

I noticed that the result contains NULL values for negative numbers as the base:

Is it a specific behavior of DolphinDB?

Answer 1

Yes, in DolphinDB, when a negative number is raised to an exponent, the result is NULL.

In contrast, Python generates a complex number as the result:

pow(-3, 1/3.0) 
// output：(0.7211247851537043+1.2490247664834064j)