[Tutor] project euler prime factorization problem

[Nick]

"Did you test the program? That is one way to tell whether it works perfectly. What you showed above will do one visible thing - it will print "Don't forget to consider primes 2, 3, 5, and 7\n". The rest is a somewhat confusing collection of function definitions and comments. You never call the functions so nothing else will happen.

As Alan said - research prime factors to see how others approach it.

My current reasoning was something of this sort:  Find all the factors of a number, then reduce them to just the prime factors

Very inefficient. IMHO the proper way is to generate a list of all the prime numbers up to the square root of 600851475143, then test each (starting with the largest and working down) till you discover a factor. That then is the answer.

There are many published algorithms for generating primes.

and you can then multiply them together to get that number thus having the prime factors.  I need a lot of help haha.  Thanks in advance everyone.  If anyone has a good resource to point me to other than the open book project and dive into python it would be much appreciated.  Would it be useful for me to buy a book, and if so what are some easily accessible ones?  I feel dive into python is just too advanced for me.  I understand a lot of the teachings, but the examples seem unwieldy and esoteric.


--
Bob Gailer
"


Yeah, thanks everyone for the comments.  I will follow your advice Bob.  I didn't call the

functions in the program because I was calling them myself in the interpreter after running it.  I

don't know if that is the way everyone else programs, but I just write it in idle and save it and run

it over and over making sure it is doing what I want
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