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em3rgent0rdrtoday at 4:06 AM1 replyview on HN

And could use fixed-point decimal for more efficiency since can store as integers and use integer hardware for them. So for instance with 32-bits, the 16 most-sig bits store the number of turns and the 16 least-significant bits store the fraction of a turn. Then if you want to wrap angles that exceed 360 degrees back around the circle, you can simply Logical_AND with 0x0000FFFF. And while you are at it, you could just use fixed-point decimal for sine and cos, whereby the maximum of +1 or -1 map to the most positive and most negative integer value. These type of optimizations were common before FPUs were cheap and fast.


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aldoniustoday at 4:47 AM

Binary fractions of a turn are also a nice intuition pump for two's complement in general.

Let's keep it simple and use just 8 bits. 0° is 0x00, 180° is 0x80, and 255/256ths of 360° is 0xFF. And if we wanted to use signed integers, then 0x80 through 0xFF - the high-bit half of the range - now represent the negative quadrants just as they represent negative integers.

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