Why there is no operator for exponentiation in C++ ?

Question

C++ is considered to a powerful programming language which is used for the development of most of the popular software today. But why such a powerful language does not have an operator for exponentiation(raising a number to the power of - Example 5 to the power of 20). Of course, there is a pow() function and one can define own a function for that.

When languages like VB or application like Excel provide ** or ^ for this operation, I wonder why a powerful language like C++ does not have this. For that matter I wonder why C and Java also do not have an operator for exponentiation.

How can we call these as powerful languages?

Answer 1

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14626960/why-doesnt-c-have-a-power-operator

Answer 2

There is actually powers of two though. 1 << n is equal to 2^n, and it is really fast.