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

George Birbilis birbilis at kagi.com
Fri Mar 19 17:36:50 MST 2004


> In most cases there will be "30", "45" or some such so it should be
> obvious enough that these are degrees and not radians.

no need to say

<angle value="30"/>, can say <angle degrees="30"/> instead and avoid any
misinterpretation of what "degrees" means

unless the pattern <angle>30</angle> will be used which of course can be
misinterpreted, unless a pattern like
<angle format="degrees">30</angle> is used

the last one allows for future additions to the format collection (like
"radians" etc.) and still having strict schema-based validation

the <angle degrees="30"/> pattern may not be so extensible, since even if an
<angle radians="..."/> was added one might cause problems by writing <angle
degrees="30" radians="10"/>, that is provide unrelated values to the degrees
and radians attributes (can't easily enforce it via schema checking) or just
write <angle/> or something (could consider that though to be equal to 0)

-----
George Birbilis (birbilis at kagi.com)
http://www.kagi.com/birbilis
--------------



More information about the ODE mailing list