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What is the radius of a circle that has a circumference of 1 (as proposed in TFA)? It is 0.5/PI == ~0.15915, which means you are just moving the "problem" elsew
by Aardappel 4y ago
What is the radius of a circle that has a circumference of 1 (as proposed in TFA)? It is 0.5/PI == ~0.15915, which means you are just moving the "problem" elsewhere. I am sure there's a lot of math that is simpler with radius being 1.0 (with some input in radians) vs an input in "turns" and having to deal with a 0.15915 radius.
Yes, agree turns would be so much nicer for many use cases, but I'd like to see which operations it makes worse first :)
If indeed almost every hardware/library implementation of `sin` would lose a multiply by an arbitrary constant by choosing a new input scale, that would convince me too, as long as it was the same scale for all.
- EmilioMartinez 4y agoBut the proposal here would not change the circumference to 1, it's about representing angles in another currency. More often that not when you are doing trigonometry you care more about angles than arclength. The issue stems from thinking angles in terms of arc length.
- Aardappel 4y agoThe angle needing to be used as a length (to be able to use the same scale as a unit radius) is something that naturally happens in a lot of trig algorithms. It depends whether you care more about the "UI" (the user of the algorithm gets a more pleasant input range to use) vs how convoluted the implementation is (somewhere deep down an extra multiply by 0.15915 was needed). All I am saying that "turns" are not universally better, they have downsides too.