What is the associativity of Python's ** operator?
<p>I was just playing around with the python command line and the ** operator, which as far as I know performs a power function.  So 2 ** 3 should be (and is) 8 because 2 * 2 * 2 = 8.</p>

<p>Can someone explain the behavior I found?  I don't see any way to group the operations with parentheses to actually get a result of 65536 like was attained here.</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; 2 ** 2 ** 2
16
&gt;&gt;&gt; 2 ** 2 ** 2 ** 2
65536
&gt;&gt;&gt; (2 ** 2 ** 2) ** 2
256
</code></pre>
