New Issue: Add missing imag/complex '**' operators

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28898, "bradcray", "Add missing imag/complex '**' operators", "2026-05-27T21:09:40Z"

In discussing #28784, it was noted that we are missing ** overloads for the following cases, which reflect a certain lack of symmetry across types:

  • complex ** int
  • param complex ** param [int | complex]
  • [param] imag**anything
    • would we want to support int and imag exponents here?

For imaginary values, it was noted that those values could be upcast to complex and the complex ** overload could be used, but it also seemed probable that the implementation could be optimized for plain-old imag, knowing that its real component was 0.0, suggesting a separate overload.

That said, we also believe that it will need to return a complex since the result will be real or imaginary, but cannot be determined statically (_perhaps it could be for param**param cases, but we didn't want the return type to be dependent on the values passed in). Someone for whom complex exponentiation is more natural than it is for me/us should check our work here.