Going further along these lines, I propose that ** not be infix power, rather that be just pow.
Remember that infix left-tight (the R3-Alpha way) grabs its immediate evaluated left argument:
>> power 2 2 + 1
== 8.0
>> 2 pow 2 + 1
== 5.0
And incidentally, that's the name of the standard C library function for power.
After seeing how use-it-every-day useful -- has become, hopefully this gets everyone thinking... what cool symbolic purpose might ** serve? How about ++?