I was quite excited at the prospect that 2011 might be a prime number. I happened to be at my computer, but not on the internet, so I wrote a little computer program to run through the factors of 2011. If a number has no factors other than itself and 1, then it is prime.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, my program told me that 2011 is indeed a prime year. Yay!<\/p>\n
Of course the moment I got on-line, I could just Google it, using 2011<\/b> and prime<\/b> as the search words. Sure enough, 2011 pops up on the very first hit (Wikipedia’s list of the first 1000 prime numbers).<\/p>\n
The program was very simple (it took maybe 30 seconds to write), but I find it sad that I can’t easily share my joy of discovery, since unless you already know Java, the code I wrote will look to you like gobbledygook:<\/p>\n
for (int i = 1 ; i <= 2011 ; i++)\n if (2011 % i == 0)\n System.out.println(i);<\/font><\/p>\n If I translate this into a friendlier looking programming language, it might look like this:<\/p>\n for every I<\/b> from 1<\/b> through 2011<\/b> That’s almost ok, except that people who don’t already know programming will get stuck at that second line. So let’s replace it with something even friendlier:<\/p>\n for every I<\/b> from 1<\/b> through 2011<\/b> Ah, that’s more like it! Meanwhile, if you’re a more advanced programmer, you can peek to see how the computer is told what “is divisible by” means, again in this friendly computer language:<\/p>\n A<\/b> is divisible by B<\/b> means Now we have something that anybody reading this blog can understand. And in my mind that was actually the program I wrote — except that as I typed the program, I automatically changed it into Java programming, sort of the way a pianist might transpose music from one key to another.<\/p>\n Maybe it would be a good idea to make it very easy to create these sorts of conversational programming Mad Libs<\/a> (such as: “for every — from — to — ” or “the remainder of — divided by — “). Then it would be easy to write a program that anybody at all could read (or maybe even write), but which would still run on a computer.<\/p>\n Maybe we should hurry up and do that, while it’s still a prime numbered year. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was quite excited at the prospect that 2011 might be a prime number. I happened to be at my computer, but not on the internet, so I wrote a little computer program to run through the factors of 2011. If a number has no factors other than itself and 1, then it is prime. … Continue reading “Prime directive”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5526"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5526"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5560,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5526\/revisions\/5560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n if 2011<\/b> mod I<\/b> is 0<\/b>
\n print I<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n
\n if 2011<\/b> is divisible by I<\/b>
\n print I<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n
\n the remainder of A<\/b> divided by B<\/b> is 0<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n