title: Computational cost of trig functions
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/345085/how-do-trigonometric-functions-work">How do Trigonometric functions work?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  
  
  <p>What actually goes into the computation of trig functions like Sin, Cos, Tan and Atan?</p>
  
  <p>I think I've found an optimization in my code where I can avoid using any of these functions and base the problem around slope instead of angles.  So that means a couple division operations in place of the above trig functions.  But I'd like to know more about what goes into those trig functions so that I can compare my new code (from the perspective of number of basic math ops).  Or maybe I've just found a more circuitous way of doing the same thing, or worse, introduced a less efficient method.</p>
  
  <p>Using C++ and Python but I imagine these is fairly language agnostic with math operation cost being relative to the most primitive operations.</p>