Re: [OpenGuides-Dev] locator plugins

IvorW wrote: I know we've talked about simply calculating distances from point A to point B on the surface of a sphere in the past, and rejected it because you lose accuracy over small distances, due to rounding errors in cos() and sin(). I wonder, if we used an arbitrary precision FP library like Math::BigFloat does this problem go away? It doesn't provide trig functions, but they can be derived thus: cos(x) = 1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! - x^6/6! + ... (x in radians) and sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7! + ... This is guaranteed to give us accurate results provided we use sufficiently accurate values for sin(x) and cos(x), I wonder what the performance hit would be. -- David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence Obviously, Linux owes its heritage to UNIX but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim -- Darl McBride, CEO, SCO, 28 Aug 2002 talking to Jeff Gerhardt of Linux Journal