OpenEuphoria

Original date:2015-04-02 04:22:20 Edited by: Shian_Lee Subject: Re: Good documentation (arc length?)

Special request from Tom or anyone else:

I would like to know the way to calculate the length of an arc.

There are many ways to do it, but unfortunately the last time I applied to work for NASA I was rejected. I guess that I'm not good enough.

So, what I need is: an accurate, simple, fast, practical, proven way to calculate the length of an arc.

I already found my own way to do it, when I wrote the program for an iron cutting machine. But, obviously there is a better way.

I've tried all those formulas from the Internet - but the most accurate formulas gave me really strange results that I could not understand (it might be good for flying to the moon, but not really what I needed). Other formulas gave me not accurate results.

The cutting machine has to move exactly between each 0.1mm points of an arc, so I needed a good formula for this.

The best thing that could happen is if an accurate formula was included as a code example for sin() or cos() - since it's a very useful task, but seems to be an impossible mission.

I hope that I don't talk nonsense here.

Thank you.

ps: I forgot to mention that important part of the MS-QuickBasic documentation was a directory of valuable example-programs.

EDIT: BTW, I was looking now in Wikipedia, it seems that lots of new articles were written since the time that I was looking for Arc-Length. Yet, I'm still wondering if those new(?) formulas are accurate enough.