If it matters, I'm actually coding in c++ for this one, but the ? applies to the method, not the code.

Is there a "pretty" way to test for primality or is it actually necessary to do something like this? I can think of plenty of ways to do it(ifs with mods was my first idea), but is there a purely methodical/mathematical way to know a # is prime?

Tyler,

No matter how're you coding, it's the algorithm that counts. Small Fermat theorem is handy.

It all depends upon how many tests you are doing and the size of the numbers you are testing. Very small numbers (up to 1G) can simply be stored in a bitmap for fast testing. Very big numbers require specialised algorithms and usually specialised form of numbers to work on. A program like Primo (google for it) can generate primality proofs for numbers up to tens of thousands of bits in size if you are working with numbers of that size.

When someone found "Primo" please post at least the search query text because I'm continuously unable to find it

LocoDelAssembly: Is a direct link good enough?

http://www.ellipsa.eu/

Found with "q=Primo+primality+proving+program".

Yep, it is much more reachable now, thanks

Sorry I didn't respond sooner, but I ended just making a linked list of all the primes I found, and since I was searching sequentially and starting at 2, all I had to do was test the next number against all the previous primes, and if none of them divided into the number being tested, it was prime.

Is that way acceptable?

Sure it is. If that is all you need then that is fine. It depends upon what you need to achieve. If you only want 1000 or so primes then that method will work great, easy to program and finished pretty quickly. If you need say 100 digit primes then you might have to start looking at different methods else with the trial division method you are using you will be waiting for eternity just to test one number.

I doubt I'll encounter that problem, considering that I have no idea how to go about calculating numbers lager than a "double" in C/C++. I guess I could use something like http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpp-bigint/, but what good would that do me, since I don't understand it. If I was going to deal with numbers bigger than could be natively(by the language), I'd probably made some asm routines to be called from the C/C++ since asm's better at addressing memory directly.(without being limited by types)

Just a thought, imagine how much memory it would take to store all those primes leading up to the first hundred digit prime if I were to attempt to use said method on such a number. I would guess it would be quite a bit.

more than a bit
quite a few bytes in fact

Oh, you're funny!
There needs to be a sarcasm emoticon

http://cboard.cprogramming.com/general-discussions/128722-pluspluseureka.html - Read a couple of posts(It's not resolved in the first.). This could actually be useful.