On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 1:01 PM, Rick Waldron <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just because other languages don't include a TAU constant doesn't mean > ECMAScript cannot. > > Just because "serious mathematicians" think this is "crackpot territory", > doesn't mean it's not useful (the condescension of that claim certainly > isn't). > As I mentioned, although I am a pi-ist, I think Math.TAU is harmless. But I will qualify the "not useful" part -- there is no numerical accuracy benefit to using Math.TAU (only the floating point exponent changes), nor is there likely to be any emitted-code improvement (constant propagation being a standard part of any reasonable runtime). So the benefit is solely the single character minimized code size improvement from '2*Math.PI' to 'Math.TAU' (if this were significant wouldn't the minimizers be assigning this to a single-character variable already?), and the the code readability improvement of using Math.TAU (assuming the readers of your code are also tau-ists). So I would be highly skeptical of any claim to "utility". I am, however, sympathetic to the idea that many users will feel TAU to be "fun" -- which does have its (limited) place in language design. --scott
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