Pi not multiplied by 2 has only one application, which is ancient. For most objects, it is easier to measure directly the diameter than the radius. Then you can compute the circumference by multiplying with Pi.
Except for this conversion from directly measured diameters, one rarely cares about hemicycles, but about cycles.
The trigonometric functions with arguments measured in cycles are more accurate and faster to compute. The trigonometric functions with arguments measured in radians have simpler formulae for derivatives and primitives. The conversion factor between radians and cycles is 2Pi, which leads to its ubiquity.
While students are taught to use the trigonometric functions with arguments measured in radians, because they are more convenient for some symbolic computations, any angle that is directly measured is never measured in radians, but in fractions of a cycle. The same is true for any angle used by an output actuator. The methods of measurement with the highest precision for any physical quantity eventually measure some phase angle in cycles. Even the evaluations of the trigonometric functions with angles measured in radians must use an internal conversion between radians and cycles, for argument range reduction.
So the use of the 2*Pi constant is unavoidable in almost any modern equipment or computer program, even if many of the uses are implicit and not obvious for whoever does not know the detailed implementations of the standard libraries and of the logic hardware.
If trigonometric functions with arguments measured in radians are used anywhere, then conversions between radians in cycles must exist, either explicit conversions or implicit conversions.
If only trigonometric functions with arguments measured in cycles are used, then some multiplications with 2Pi or its inverse appear where derivatives or primitives are computed.
In any application that uses trigonometric functions millions of multiplications with 2Pi may be done every second. In contrast, a multiplication by Pi could be needed only at most at the rate at which one could measure the diameters of some physical objects for which there would be a reason to want to know their circumference.
Because Pi is needed so much more rarely, it is simpler to just have a constant Pi_2 to be used in most cases and for the rare case of computing a circumference from the diameter to use Pi_2*D/2,
> The trigonometric functions with arguments measured in cycles are more accurate and faster to compute.
Please expand on this. Surely if that were the case, numerical implementations would first convert a radian input to cycles before doing whatever polynomial/rational approximation they like, but I've never seen one like that.
> Because Pi is needed so much more rarely, it is simpler to just have a constant Pi_2 to be used in most cases and for the rare case of computing a circumference from the diameter to use Pi_2*D/2,
Well of course, that's why you have (in C) M_PI, M_PI2, and so on (and in some dialects M_2PI).
> Surely if that were the case, numerical implementations would first convert a radian input to cycles before doing whatever polynomial/rational approximation they like, but I've never seen one like that.
Then you have not examined the complete implementation of the function.
The polynomial/rational approximation mentioned by you is valid only for a small range of the possible input arguments.
Because of this, the implementation of any exponential/logarithmic/trigonometric function starts by an argument range reduction, which produces a value inside the range of validity of the approximating expression, by exploiting some properties of the function that must be computed.
In the case of trigonometric functions, the argument must be reduced first to a value smaller than a cycle, which is equivalent to a conversion from radians to cycles and then back to radians. This reduction, and the rounding errors associated with it, is avoided when the function uses arguments already expressed in cycles, so that the reduction is done exactly by just taking the fractional part of the argument.
Then the symmetry properties of the specific trigonometric function are used to further reduce the range of the argument to one fourth or one eighth of a cycle. When the argument had been expressed in cycles this is also an exact operation, otherwise it can also introduce rounding errors, because adding or subtracting Pi or its submultiples cannot be done exactly.
We start of with a range reduction to [0, pi/4] (presumably this would be [0, 1/8] in cycles), and then the polynomial happens.
If cycles really were that better, why isn't this implemented as starting with a conversion to cycles, then removal of the interval part, and then a division by 8, followed by whatever the appropriate polynomial/rational function is?
> adding or subtracting Pi or its submultiples cannot be done exactly.
I was also assuming that we've been talking about floating point this whole time.
