Exponentiation in Sass

Question

After discovering that Sass doesn't have exponential abilities, I decided to make my own pow() function. This is my unsuccessful attempt:

@function pow($x,$p) {
  $u: unit($x);
  $x: $x / 1#{$u};
  $p: round($p);
  @if $p == 0 {
    @return 0;
  } @else if $p == 1 {
    @return $x;
  } @else {
    @for $i from 1 through abs($p) {
      $x: $x * $x;
    }
  }
  @if $p < 0 {
    $x: 1 / $x;
  }

  @return $x + $u;
}

The part I'm stuck with is stripping off units. I know that 12px / 1px = 12, but in my case the unit is unknown, and 12px / 1#{unit(12px)} doesn't work because it equals to "12px/1px" (yes, with quotes). The unquote function doesn't seem to work for me, I don't know why.

In case you're wondering, the reason why I want to strip units (and return them in the end) is because 12px * 12px = 144px*px.

Answer 1

Instead writing pow in Sass use Ruby http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/Sass/Script/Functions.html