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

[Chris Ledwith]

>> 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

Good point. Perhaps degrees are better...

> 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
>

Putting it in "units of PI" would still require a conversion so if you're
going to require a conversion then it'd be better to just go with degrees.
In most cases there will be "30", "45" or some such so it should be
obvious enough that these are degrees and not radians.

-Chris