[ODE] XODE - should angles be in degrees or radians?

[Ed Jones]

As if my opinion counts for anything, but I second this.
The less "variables" the better.

And I don't care whether it's radians or degrees, as Steve says the 
conversion's trivial, but the "human readability" argument for degrees 
makes sense.

Cheers,
Ed.


Steve Baker wrote:

> Nguyen Binh wrote:
>
>> Hi William,
>>
>>    How's about both? :)
>
>
> Ack!  There you go with the **BAD** idea of having options again.
>
> Options don't help *anyone*.  They will make for a poor file format
> and not very robust applications code.
>
> Let me explain this one more time (everyone except Nguyen can feel
> free to skip this if you've read my other three rants about this!!)
>
> The file writer can trivially multiply all the angles by some number
> to shift them into whatever single standard the file format requires.
> That takes almost no time - and consumes at most just one line of code
> - and it happens in a place where we don't care so much about either
> time or lines of code.
>
> However, if you make it optional then now you complicate the file
> reader because it has to parse out a 'degrees or radians' flag in
> the file - then it has to conditionally do the conversion.  All of
> this takes MUCH more time and MANY more lines of code than doing it
> in the writer - *AND* as I've pointed out before, there are more
> versions of the reader likely to be created - and more chance that
> reading files will be more time critical than writing them.
>
> You also run into the situation where somebody creates a reader
> to read the files that come from a particular physics modelling
> package that (say) always uses radians.   The author of the reader
> doesn't notice the thing in the XODE manual that says they could
> possibly be in radians - and thinks that his program is working.
> Then someone uses a different physics modeller to feed it data
> and suddenly it sees angles in radians for the first time and
> does something horribly wrong.
>
> Even if the author of the reader implements the degrees-or-radians
> switch, he may have no way to test it - having never seens a file
> with radians in it.
>
> For this single, narrow issue of degrees versus radians, you may
> think I'm going over the top - but multiply that by the number
> of other options you might come up with - and you'll have a
> file format that is flakey as hell in typical usage.
>
> This is NOT the way to build a solid, portable, and reasonably
> efficient file format.
>
> We must choose one of the other and stick by it consistently
> no matter what.  IMHO, we should use degrees because human-readability
> is a strong reason for using XML and most humans prefer degrees to
> radians - but I don't have a strong opinion about that.
>
> This argument applies to ALL optional features...there shouldn't
> be any representational choices in the file format what so ever!!
>
> ---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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