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

[Shaul Kedem]

While I don't know where Steve is getting all this
zest from (heh) I agree with his argument, so I vote
for degrees only.

--- Steve Baker <sjbaker1 at airmail.net> 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
> -------------------------
> HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>    WorkEmail:
> <sjbaker at link.com>
> HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
> Projects : http://plib.sf.net   
> http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
>             http://tuxkart.sf.net
> http://prettypoly.sf.net
> -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
> GCS d-- s:+ a+ C++++$ UL+++$ P--- L++++$ E--- W+++ N
> o+ K? w--- !O M-
> V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+
> e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++
> -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> ODE mailing list
> ODE at q12.org
> http://q12.org/mailman/listinfo/ode


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com