@Benjamin
True. But what would it take for them to convert from degrees to radian for the benefit of the programmer? Were the processor instructions similarly constrained when the C language was first developed?
@Sven B
I can see the argument but what units are used most often? At a guess I'd say engineers, who are likely to be more plentiful than mathematicians, and now game developers and hobbyists get the most use out programming languages.
Not arguing, mind you. I'll go through the steps as necessary. But two things bug me. One is my need (OK, want) for speed where the extra conversion rankles me.
The other is that I do this kind of thing infrequently enough that I have to look up the relationship again, due to my aging memory, but often enough that it bothers me that I can't remember. And I can never find that
#define radians(degrees)
macro that came in so handy twenty years ago.
The problem is that it's hard to think in terms of radians because they're really pretty large units or chunks out of a full circle, something close to 57 degrees if I remember right. A couple of weeks ago I started a small utility project for drawing not only full circles but also arcs using GDK, mostly for one purpose I have at hand that requires that I use floating point radii instead of integers.
My first inclination was just to plot x/y points from 0 to 360 degrees. Gawd, did that leave gaps in the circle. Imagine taking that approach using radians. Just how fine would you need to increment your angle to get all the gaps filled and how large a radius? Okay, so that approach didn't work out whether it was in degrees or radians. But it was much easier to approach it from incremental degrees rather than small pieces of big radians.
Lilith, Night Butterfly
I'm not a programmer but I play one in the office
