Meme of two women fighting while a man smokes from a pipe in the background.

The women fighting are labeled “mathematicians defining pi” and “engineers just using 3 because it’s within tolerance”

The man smoking is labeled “astrophysicists” and the pipe is labeled “pi = 1”

  • @[email protected]
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    504 days ago

    as an engineer, a lot of languages (even proprietary ones) have a built-in constant pi variable because it is so ubiquitous - its easier and more readable to use pi than 3…

    • Mad_Punda
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      174 days ago

      And then you’re using C++ and they scold you for including cmath for just M_PI because it increases compilation times.

      • @[email protected]
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        204 days ago

        We’re talking about engineers here! We’re using MATLAB or Python if we’re programming at all.

      • Fushuan [he/him]
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        6
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        3 days ago

        As they should, if that’s the only thing you are using it for, don’t introduce a whole header file, just put the following in the constants.h or equivalent that the proj for sure has:

        #define M_PI   3.14159265358979323846264338327950288
        

        Yes, it’s literally what math.h has defined.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          If I’m not completely mistaken M_PI is not part of the C standard, so depending on your stdlib or compiler or even compiler flags you will have to define it yourself even in C.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 days ago

      I’ve also never seen a fellow engineer simplify pi to just 3, although I have seen a rise of memes from people who think they do.

      I would slap someone if I saw them try that, it’s unnecessarily sloppy. 3.14 is the default, and trivial to work with if you’re using a calculator (I would also slap someone if I saw them not using a calculator). Unless you just LIKE having all your calculations be off by almost 5%. Then you’ll come back wondering why so many of your parts are out of tolerance.