Question

I am new at programming and I am practicing my C# programming skills. My application is meant to find the largest prime factor of a number entered by the user. But my application is not returning the right answer and I dont really know where the problem is. Can you please help me?

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Calcular máximo factor primo de n. De 60 es 5.");
            Console.Write("Escriba un numero: ");
            long num = Convert.ToInt64(Console.ReadLine());
            long mfp = maxfactor(num);
            Console.WriteLine("El maximo factor primo es: " + num);
            Console.Read();
        }
        static private long maxfactor (long n)
        {
            long m=1 ;
            bool en= false;
            for (long k = n / 2; !en && k > 1; k--)
            {
                if (n % k == 0 && primo(k))
                {
                    m = k;
                    en = true;
                }
            }
            return m;

        }
        static private bool primo(long x)
        {
            bool sp = true;
            for (long i = 2; i <= x / 2; i++)
            {
                if (x % i == 0)
                    sp = false;
            }
            return sp;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

It will be much faster to remove the small factors until the residue is prime.

static private long maxfactor (long n)
{
    long k = 2;
    while (k * k <= n)
    {
        if (n % k == 0)
        {
            n /= k;
        }
        else
        {
            ++k;
        }
    }

    return n;
}

For example, if n = 784, this does 9 modulo operations instead of several hundred. Counting down even with the sqrt limit still would do 21 modulo ops just in maxfactor, and another dozen in primo.

New more optimized version here