sinl

sinl is a mathematical function in the C standard library that computes the sine of a long double value. It is the long double precision variant of the sine function, designed for higher precision calculations compared to the standard double-precision sine (sin). The function is declared in the math.h header in C, and in C++ it is available in <cmath> as std::sinl.

The signature is long double sinl(long double x); the input x is interpreted in radians, and the function returns the sine of x as a long double. As with other trigonometric functions, sinl is typically implemented using argument reduction to bring the input into a small range and then a polynomial or table-based approximation to compute the result.

Behavior and edge cases: For finite input, sinl returns the sine of x with long double precision. For non-finite inputs such as NaN or ±∞, the result is generally NaN, and some environments may raise floating-point exceptions. The exact handling of exceptions can depend on the implementation and settings of the floating-point environment.

Usage considerations: sinl is used when calculations require the extended precision of long double types, or when interoperability with long double data is important. It complements the float and double variants (sinf and sin) and is available on platforms and toolchains that support long double arithmetic. In practice, availability and performance of sinl may vary by compiler and hardware; some platforms may treat long double the same as double.