Complex literals (was Re: I am never going to complain about Python again)

[Roy Smith]

In article <l3l850$2aq$1 at dont-email.me>, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> 
wrote:

> Then upgrade to 3D.  You can represent latitude and longitude
> as a 3-element unit vector.  (GPS systems do this; latitude and
> longitude are only generated at the end, for output.)

And annoyingly so.  Somebody I know was building a tracking system based 
on a PIC chip and a Trimble GPS module.  The danged thing would only 
give him lat/long, which he then had to devote a sizable chunk of his 
very limited CPU power to converting into some more useful coordinate 
system.  Internally, the GPS module was certainly working in something 
more useful than lat/long, but didn't expose that.

I've done similar math when doing some molecular modeling.  Atoms are 
free to rotate in 3-space around the inter-atomic bonds.  You don't want 
to have to worry about dividing by zero just because some rotation angle 
is 0 or 90 or some other magic number.