Question

When I write the following code I get garbage for an output. It is just a simple program to find prime numbers. It works when the first for loops range only goes up to 1000 but once the range becomes large the program fail’s to output meaningful data

output = open("output.dat", 'w')
for i in range(2, 10000):
    prime = 1
    for j in range(2, i-1): 
        if i%j == 0:
            prime = 0
            j = i-1
    if prime == 1:
        output.write(str(i) + " " )
output.close()
print "writing finished"

Answer 1

This is a known Notepad bug. Check out

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/04/17/2158334.aspx

The classic way to trigger this bug is to put “Bush hid the facts” in a file, save it, reopen it, and scream about conspiracy theories, but I guess “2 3 5 7 11 13 17” works too, except that you don’t get to scream about conspiracy theories.