Question

Can anyone offer advice for my code in ps1? The program runs but times out without a result. I'm pretty sure the problem is in the loop where I divide the prime candidate by all the primes less than its square root. But I have no idea how to fix that.

http://codepad.org/4lgfO1cd

Answer 1

You've got an infinite loop, line 8:

while number < highdivisor

Answer 2

Make sure you change either 'number' or 'highdivisor' so that you eventually break out of the loop

Answer 3

Ugh- so obvious and yet it escaped me. Thanks!

Answer 4

But with only [2, 3] in her list, shouldn't the loop only run twice with "for number in confirmedprimes:"? Admittedly, my python fu sucks, but if I did this in bash
for number in [ 2, 3 ]; do
something
done
it would loop only twice.

Answer 5

True.

However, the script will add more elements to the list as it runs (but I would prefer using confirmedprimes.append() since it would add it to the end of the list instead of inserting the new element right before the end of the list). The for loop runs inside a while loop, so once the code loops the for loop will use a longer confirmedprimes list.

Answer 6

I guess I'll have to wait until I get to that assignment to figure that out, because I'm confused. Then again, I have a BA in English, and am no mathematician.