Important points:

• The curve oscillates between 1 and -1.
• The curve repeats every 2pi.

A look at the unit circle shows the reasons. As t proceeds around the unit circle, sin(t) goes up to 1 then down to -1, and then repeats as t keeps going around the circle. It repeats every 2pi because the circumference of the unit circle is2pi.

Cosine
The graph of cosine is the same as sine, but shifted by -pi/2.

So sin(t) = cos(t – pi/2). For oscillation, either can be used to the same effect. A very interesting relation between sine and cosine is that the slope of the sine curve at any value of t is cos(t).

The sine and cosine functions are defined on what is called the unit circle, which is a circle with a radius of 1 and centered at the origin, (0,0).

t is the length of an arc that starts at the right side of the circle and proceeds in a counter-clockwise direction. Cosine(t) and sine(t) give the x and y coordinates, respectively, of the end point of the arc. That is all there is to it.

There are a few important things to notice:

• t keeps going around and around the circle, and so the sine and cosine values keep repeating.
• cosine and sine values are always between 1 and -1
• for any t, the point (cos t, sin t) is a distance of 1 from the center
• the circumference of the unit circle is 2*pi

It helps to draw the unit circle when trying to get sine and cosine working in a program, especially when they are new to you.

Variables in the demos that represent a value for t will start with ”t”, such as “tCar“.

Radians
Radians are also defined on the unit circle. In the diagram below, the angle rhas a size of t radians.

There are 2*pi radians in a full rotation. 2*pi radians = 360 degrees.

To convert from degrees to radians, multiply by (2 * pi) / 360 (or pi/180)

To convert from radians to degrees, multiply by 360 / (2 * pi) (or 180/pi)

Calculating t given x and y
t is calculated from x and y by the arc-tangent function. Director provides an arc-tangent function called atan(). Its definition is shown in the diagram above, with the following condition:

Since y/x = -y/-x and y/-x = -y/x, atan(y/x) will return the same values for the shaded quadrants, and the same values for the unshaded quadrants.
atan() doesn’t let you specify which quadrant you mean, and always returns a value on the right side of the circle, in other words between pi/2 and -pi/2.

This means that if x is negative (left side of circle), pi must be added to the result of atan(y/x) to get t.

A trick to doing this in a single expression is:

t = atan(y/x) + pi * (1 – x/abs(x)) / 2.0

This returns a t between -pi/2 and 3pi/2.

If x is zero, the divisions in the expression will cause errors. A few ways to handle x=0 are 1) set x to a very small number and use atan(y/x) or, more correctly, 2) don’t use atan() — if x=0, t is pi/2 if y is positive, or -pi/2 if y is negative.

Update
There is an undocumented Lingo function, atan(y, x), that takes care of the two complications mentioned above. It returns a value between -pi and pi.