>A short history question: Was there a reason for using degrees with
>rotate and radians with the trigonometric functions, or did just happen
>that way?


I'd say it's quite natural that the _functions_ take radians as parameters,
because in mathematics, you rarely use degrees to express angles and/or to
perform trigonometric oerations, to put it that way.

As for the rotations, the degrees is for many a more natural and intuitive
approach to orientation in space. You don't say "turn around pi", but "turn
around 180 degrees." Maybe it would be natural to have alternate
rotate-definitions, accepting radians?

If we started to use degrees instead of radians in the trigonometric
functions, people would be confused, as AFAIK every programming language use
radians. Also, it would be cumbersome to have triginometric functions that
behave differently than the usual. For example, the limit:

limit  sin (x) / x
x->0

is different for the two functions. Functions as arcsin, arctan and so forth
gets trickier to use.

Regards,
Simen Kvaal.

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