Calculating perfect numbers in Pascal

Hi all i was just wondering if anyone here has ever tried to calculate perfect numbers from scratch in Bloodshed softwares Dev-Pascal. i have been tasked to do this for a college teacher. any help would be appreciated. and the sooner the better.

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by Elhueno

Hi all i was just wondering if anyone here has ever tried to calculate perfect numbers from scratch in Bloodshed softwares Dev-Pascal. i have been tasked to do this for a college teacher. any help would be appreciated. and the sooner the better.

What do you mean by "calculate perfect numbers"? Do you mean

"write a program that will find p such that 2^p-1 is prime?"

Once you have such p, then a perfect number is just (2^p-1) * 2^(p-1)
Hint: this has already been done.

Or do you mean

"given a list of such p, compute 2^(p-1) * (2^p -1)"??

If so, you must again specify what you mean by "compute".

Do you mean "calculate the decimal representation"? or "calculate the
hex representation"? or "calculate the binary representation"?? [the latter
two are trivial].

[Mini-Geek]

Originally Posted by R.D. Silverman

What do you mean by "calculate perfect numbers"? Do you mean

"write a program that will find p such that 2^p-1 is prime?"

Once you have such p, then a perfect number is just (2^p-1) * 2^(p-1)
Hint: this has already been done.

Or do you mean

"given a list of such p, compute 2^(p-1) * (2^p -1)"??

If so, you must again specify what you mean by "compute".

Do you mean "calculate the decimal representation"? or "calculate the
hex representation"? or "calculate the binary representation"?? [the latter
two are trivial].

I'd assume he meant a program that finds perfect numbers by factoring numbers, adding their factors, then seeing if those two are equal. A better way to calculate, as you suggested, would be to find Mersenne primes (preferably by LL test) and know the perfect numbers by that.
I think a better, revised question would be how to write the LL test in Pascal.

[Housemouse]

Any program to search for an odd perfect number, if any exist?

[bsquared]

Originally Posted by Housemouse

Any program to search for an odd perfect number, if any exist?

www.oddperfect.org

[philmoore]

My impression of the original poster's request was that this was an assignment in programming rather than a math project. My guess is that the teacher wanted a program, which for each integer input n, computed the sum of proper divisors of n to see if it is equal to n, perhaps contained in a loop incrementing n. This can be done in a very simple-minded (and inefficient) way, or one could apply a bit of math to make the search more efficient. Perhaps the original poster should clarify what is really wanted.