Today, I decided to mess around with a coding challenge. I found this one called “Prime Mates” and figured, why not? It sounded interesting enough.
First, I opened up my code editor. I like to keep things simple, so I just use a basic text editor and the command line. No fancy IDEs for me.
Next, I read through the problem description a couple of times. Gotta make sure I understand what they’re asking for. Seemed like I needed to find pairs of numbers that, when added together, make a prime number. Ok, I can handle that.
Breaking it Down
- I started by writing a function to check if a number is prime. Just a simple loop that checks for divisors. Nothing too crazy.
- Then, I made another function to generate a list of numbers. I figured I’d start with a small range, like 1 to 20, just to test things out.
- After that, I wrote the main part of the program. This is where I looped through the list of numbers and checked each pair to see if their sum was prime. I used my prime-checking function for this, of course.
Testing and Debugging
Of course, it didn’t work perfectly the first time. I had a few bugs. One was in my prime-checking function – I forgot to handle the case where the number is 1. Oops! Fixed that.
I added some print statements to see what was going on inside the loops. This helped me find another bug where I wasn’t comparing all the possible pairs. Silly mistake, but easy to fix.
Final Touches
Once I got it working for the small range, I tried it with a larger range of numbers. Worked like a charm!
Finally, I cleaned up the code a bit. Removed the print statements, added some comments, and made sure everything was nicely formatted. Just the usual stuff.
Overall, it was a fun little project. Not too difficult, but enough to keep me entertained for a bit. I like these kinds of challenges because they help me practice my coding skills and think about problem-solving.
