Factoring Polynomials

[Collin D]

On Dec 18, 5:30 pm, "James Mills" <prolo... at shortcircuit.net.au>
wrote:
> UPDATE:
>
> jmills at atomant:~/tmp$ cat polycalc.py
> #!/usr/bin/env python
>
> from math import sqrt
>
> def f(a, b, c):
>     if (b**2 - (4 * a * c)) < 0:
>         return None, None # Can't solve
>     x1 = -b - (sqrt(b**2 - (4 * a * c)) / (2 * a))
>     x2 = -b + (sqrt(b**2 - (4 * a * c)) / (2 * a))
>     return x1, x2
>
> print "Polynomial Solver..."
> print
>
> while True:
>     a = float(raw_input("a: "))
>     b = float(raw_input("b: "))
>     c = float(raw_input("c: "))
>
>     x = f(a, b, c)
>     if None in x:
>         print "Can't solve!"
>     else:
>         print "x = (%0.2f, %0.2f)" % x
> jmills at atomant:~/tmp$ ./polycalc.py
> Polynomial Solver...
>
> a: 1
> b: 8
> c: 5
> x = (-11.32, -4.68)

Ahh. Great.. that answers a lot of questions.
Originally I was using just a = raw_input('a: ')
And was getting errors because you cant perform mathmatical operations
on strings. >.<
Thanks again!