Exercise: Loops and Functions
As a simple way to play with functions and loops, implement the square root function using Newton's method.
In this case, Newton's method is to approximate Sqrt(x)
by picking a starting point z and then repeating:
To begin with, just repeat that calculation 10 times and see how close you get to the answer for various values (1, 2, 3, ...).
Next, change the loop condition to stop once the value has stopped changing (or only changes by a very small delta). See if that's more or fewer iterations. How close are you to the math.Sqrt?
package main
import (
"fmt"
"math"
)
var delta = 0.00001
func Sqrt(x float64) float64 {
z := 1.0
var z1 float64
z1 = z - (z * z - x) / (2 * z)
for math.Abs(z1 - z) > delta {
z = z1
z1 = z - (z * z - x) / (2 * z)
}
return z1;
}
func main() {
fmt.Println(Sqrt(2))
fmt.Println(math.Sqrt(2))
}