These functions are included in Matlab as convenience functions.  They
do get used frequently by folks working with real-world measurements.
It is true that one can always do rad = (x/180)*pi, but this
introduces the possibility of one ULP error in the calling arg.  Not
big, admittedly, but try doing sind(180) vs. sin(pi) and see what the
results are.

In any event, keeping them around as convenience functions is useful
for folks coming from (or porting code from) at Matlab background.

Just my opinion.

Stuart


On Tue, 4 Feb 2014, Johan Sigfrids wrote:

I agree with this. It seems like a lot of extra namespace usage. Besides,
if degrees2radians() is too long you always could define a constant and use
that:

const DEGREE = pi/180
sin(90DEGREE)



On Tuesday, February 4, 2014 6:57:16 PM UTC+2, Hans W Borchers wrote:

I was astonished to see the following functions in the Julia Standard
Library,
functions that accept (or return) degrees instead of radians:

    sind    asind   secd    asecd
    cosd    acosd   cscd    acscd
    tand    atand   cotd    acotd

I didn't find these function names in any other technical computing system.
Each of these functions can easily be reconstructed by the user applying
the
functions degrees2radians() and radians2degrees().

I feel these function names clutter the namespace of Julia Base without
being
of any real value. Therefore, I would like to vote for deprecating use of
these
functions in the next version of Julia.

Hans Werner


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