Is there a function for mathematics constant PI?

tweeks said:

For example, consider the awful gdm interface for copying Virtuoso cellviews

OK, I was a little hard on poor gdm.  It's not objectively "awful", just "awfully stateful". :) 

There are multiple schools of thought about how programming should be done; I come from the "write pure/side-effect-free/stateless code wherever possible" school that you tend to find more in books about Scheme than in books about Common Lisp, though you can write pure code in Common Lisp too, and impure code in Scheme using "set!" etc.

One day I discovered that most of the SKILL I write can be thought of as application of the functional programming operatons "filter", "map", and "reduce" over the Cadence database: shapes, instances, cells in the hierarchy, etc.  Writing code in terms of these three higher-order functions tended to make things clearer: my code got simpler, temp variables were elided, etc.  That's why functional programming feels like the most natural style in SKILL for me, and why being forced to destructively update symbol property lists just to get the value of PI, or having to mutate a pointer inside a gdmSpecList object, is jarring: most of the time I work in this nice, pure, side-effect free world, but once in a while I have to get my hands dirty mutating data structures.

Maybe I'm just fussy too.... :)

tweeks said:

For example, consider the awful gdm interface for copying Virtuoso cellviews

OK, I was a little hard on poor gdm.  It's not objectively "awful", just "awfully stateful". :) 

There are multiple schools of thought about how programming should be done; I come from the "write pure/side-effect-free/stateless code wherever possible" school that you tend to find more in books about Scheme than in books about Common Lisp, though you can write pure code in Common Lisp too, and impure code in Scheme using "set!" etc.

One day I discovered that most of the SKILL I write can be thought of as application of the functional programming operatons "filter", "map", and "reduce" over the Cadence database: shapes, instances, cells in the hierarchy, etc.  Writing code in terms of these three higher-order functions tended to make things clearer: my code got simpler, temp variables were elided, etc.  That's why functional programming feels like the most natural style in SKILL for me, and why being forced to destructively update symbol property lists just to get the value of PI, or having to mutate a pointer inside a gdmSpecList object, is jarring: most of the time I work in this nice, pure, side-effect free world, but once in a while I have to get my hands dirty mutating data structures.

Maybe I'm just fussy too.... :)