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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Nautical Almanac calculator methods
From: David Iwancio
Date: 2023 Jan 25, 15:27 -0800
From: David Iwancio
Date: 2023 Jan 25, 15:27 -0800
Pepperday says "'IF' is always bad taste" and "IF-testing is intellectually sloppy."
The alternative proposed? Computing a trigonometric function just to gets its sign.
A few lines of code that could just as easily be done in assembly as in BASIC may technically "eat computer space," but that offered alternative saves space by consuming processor cycles. (And Pepperday's expression, in my amateur opinion, doesn't improve readability.)
On a TI-36X SOLAR calculator I often use for computing altitudes, I've gotten to the point where I need to slow my keypresses to allow it to finish computing sines and cosines.
