Question

So my assignment is this: “Using your knowledge of square roots in addition to standard double precision accuracy with your language, what is the square root of the sum of the first 10^5 square roots?

sqrt( sqrt(0) + sqrt(1) + sqrt(2) + ... + sqrt(99999) + sqrt(100000) )

Enter the number rounded to the nearest whole number

I’ve created a script:

from math import sqrt

def sumsqrt():
    return sqrt(sum(map(sqrt, range(100001))))

def main():
    print sumsqrt      

if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

However, when I run this script in Terminal, this is the output:

mcbaby$ python cs28.py
<function sumsqrt at 0x652b0>

So I just decided to run Python in Terminal, and do it there. I did pretty much the same thing, except it worked.

>>> from math import sqrt
>>> sqrt(sum(map(sqrt, range(100001))))
4591.5148887832138

I was hoping somebody could help explain what’s going on. Thanks!

Answer 1

Change

print sumsqrt # print the address of the object in memory, similar to id(sumsqrt)

to

print sumsqrt()  # call the function and print what it returns.