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

[Nate W]

On Fri, 19 Mar 2004, Adam D. Moss wrote:

> 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...

Even though "90" would look precise in the XML, it would still need to be
converted to the binary representation of 1.570796blahblahblah, which
isn't quite equal to pi/2.  I don't think there's any escaping some
degree of inaccuracy (pardon the pun).  

My guess is (read: feel free to correct me) that a radians can be
expressed in base-10 in XML with the same precision as radians expressed
in base-2 in memory.  I further speculate that the conversion between them
won't cost any accuracy, it will just trade one inaccuracy for another.

Comment?
 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com/
http://www.featherforum.com/