Math.TAU

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 1:01 PM, Rick Waldron <waldron.rick at gmail.com>
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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