In article <3A959B66.9B14E1DA@hotmail.com>, Dan Johnson 
<zap### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:

> All the trig functions use radians, but rotate, and camera angle are 
> degrees.
> Sometimes I have to convert angles five times in one macro.  Any idea 
> why they didn't keep things consistent?

They did...they kept the functions consistent with their C equivalents, 
except for vrotate, which they kept consistent with the rotate 
transformation, which they used degrees for because most people use 
degrees for that kind of angular measurement, and they probably used 
degrees in the camera angle for the same reason...see? ;-)

My guess is that the transformations were added first, and used degrees 
because they are the angle usually used. The camera angle probably just 
went along with these. But later, when trig functions were added, they 
were kept consistent with the C functions, so people coming from C 
wouldn't get confused.

It would be nice to just use revolutions as the standard measurement, 
and provide a radians() function that takes radians, and a degrees() 
function for degrees. Probably not going to happen, though...there are 
few scenes it wouldn't break.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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