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

[W.J. van der Laan]

In my opinion this is a very strong argument to use degrees. You want to
be able to *exactly* specify a 60, 90 or 180 degree angle. No matter what
precision is used by the utilities or ODE itself right now, or in the
future.
Specifying radians in decimal in an XML file is going to give precision
issues one way or another.
If, for some reason one wants to edit the file in a generic XML or even
ascii editor (we know from HTML that there are always people that want to
do this) radians make less sense.

Maybe using multiples of PI isn't such a bad idea, it solves the precision
issue but not the intuitivity/humanreadability one. (but, '0.5' for a
'90' degree angle is still more readable than
1.5707....................................... *add arbitrary PI
precision here*)

Wladimir

> I lean towards degrees.  Now, hear me out. :)  Radians are great,
> everyone loves radians, the maths libs use radians, ODE uses
> radians.  End of story?  Well, not really; remember that when these
> numbers hit the XML file they'll be stored as decimal (that's not
> a certainty, but using, say, base PI isn't going to help make
> the format intuitive!).  The common angles of 90 degrees, 180
> degrees, 120 degrees etc look like hell in a text form as
> radians, and are also doomed to lose accuracy as they're
> dumped/undumped from a textual decimal representation.
>
> Just food for thought...
>
> --Adam
> --
> Adam D. Moss   . ,,^^   adam at gimp.org   http://www.foxbox.org/   co:3
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