Re: [Python-ideas] Trigonometry in degrees
Steven D'Aprano wrote: problem
But if there are both sin and dsin, and you ask about the difference between them, the obvious answer would be that one takes radians and the other takes degrees. The point that the degrees version is additionally exact on special values is an extra benefit. It would be nice to also fix the original sin, or more precisely to provide a way to give it a fractional multiple of pi. How about a special class PiMultiple that would represent a fractional multiple of pi? PI = PiMultiple(1) assert PI / 2 == PiMultiple(1, 2) assert cos(PI / 2) == 0 DEG = 2 * PI / 360 assert sin(45 * DEG) == sqrt(2) / 2 Best regards, Adam Bartoš
On Fri, Jun 08, 2018 at 11:11:09PM +0200, Adam Bartoš wrote:
No, that's not an extra benefit, it is the only benefit! If we can't make it exact for the obvious degree angles, there would be no point in doing this. We'd just tell people to write their own two-line functions: def sindeg(angle): return math.sin(math.radians(angle)) The only reason to even consider making this a standard library function is if we can do better than that.
It would be nice to also fix the original sin,
The sin function is not broken and does not need fixing. (Modulo quirks of individual platform maths libraries.)
What is the point of that? When you pass it to math.sin, it still needs to be converted to a float before sin can operate on it. Unless you are proposing a series of dunder methods __sin__ __cos__ and __tan__ to allow arbitrary classes to be passed to sin, cos and tan, the following cannot work:
Without a __cos__ dunder method that allows PiMultiple objects to customise the result of cos(), that last line has to fail, because cos(math.pi/2) == 0 fails.
DEG = 2 * PI / 360 assert sin(45 * DEG) == sqrt(2) / 2
Likewise. -- Steve
On Fri, Jun 08, 2018 at 11:11:09PM +0200, Adam Bartoš wrote:
No, that's not an extra benefit, it is the only benefit! If we can't make it exact for the obvious degree angles, there would be no point in doing this. We'd just tell people to write their own two-line functions: def sindeg(angle): return math.sin(math.radians(angle)) The only reason to even consider making this a standard library function is if we can do better than that.
It would be nice to also fix the original sin,
The sin function is not broken and does not need fixing. (Modulo quirks of individual platform maths libraries.)
What is the point of that? When you pass it to math.sin, it still needs to be converted to a float before sin can operate on it. Unless you are proposing a series of dunder methods __sin__ __cos__ and __tan__ to allow arbitrary classes to be passed to sin, cos and tan, the following cannot work:
Without a __cos__ dunder method that allows PiMultiple objects to customise the result of cos(), that last line has to fail, because cos(math.pi/2) == 0 fails.
DEG = 2 * PI / 360 assert sin(45 * DEG) == sqrt(2) / 2
Likewise. -- Steve
participants (3)
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Adam Bartoš -
Richard Damon -
Steven D'Aprano