PHP doesn't recognize x^y?

[Amailer]

I always thought to raise a number to a power of another you could simply do x^y, but that doesn't work in PHP (anymore I think..), I have to do pow(x,y) oO, is this normal or is something wrong with my php? All the other operations work, + * / -

Or am I just speaking non-sense and ^ was never recognized :/

[zylum]

in java and c, the ^ operator is xor, maybe the same applies to php?