Is there a function for mathematics constant PI?

The gdm interface is a pretty lightweight implementation in SKILL of the underlying C APIs which are iterator based. The CDBA C APIs are similar, but those have been abstracted out to use lists so that's hidden from the user. That didn't happen with the GDM APIs, so they seem awkward in comparison. There's no appetite to go back and provide a stateless interface though, because we'd have to support both old and new APIs and that would just double the maintenance work for primarily philosophical benefits...

defMathConstants does also feel slightly clunky, but I would have sooner had a predefined symbol with these values as properties rather than an API to retrieve a constant (it would be a pain to have to keep retrieving all the constants you need - you might end up with 19 function calls if you needed all of them, however unlikely that is). Of course you could argue it could have been implemented lots of different ways, including returning a DPL or a structure instance. However, it has been this way for 25 years probably and isn't going to change as there really is no benefit in making a change (as before, we'd have to support two ways, which seems overkill for a set of maths constants).

Andrew.

The gdm interface is a pretty lightweight implementation in SKILL of the underlying C APIs which are iterator based. The CDBA C APIs are similar, but those have been abstracted out to use lists so that's hidden from the user. That didn't happen with the GDM APIs, so they seem awkward in comparison. There's no appetite to go back and provide a stateless interface though, because we'd have to support both old and new APIs and that would just double the maintenance work for primarily philosophical benefits...

defMathConstants does also feel slightly clunky, but I would have sooner had a predefined symbol with these values as properties rather than an API to retrieve a constant (it would be a pain to have to keep retrieving all the constants you need - you might end up with 19 function calls if you needed all of them, however unlikely that is). Of course you could argue it could have been implemented lots of different ways, including returning a DPL or a structure instance. However, it has been this way for 25 years probably and isn't going to change as there really is no benefit in making a change (as before, we'd have to support two ways, which seems overkill for a set of maths constants).

Andrew.