As a Christmas gift I have written a small program in Java to calculate primes. My intention was to leave it on all night, calculating the next prime and writing it to a .txt file. In the morning I would kill the program and take the .txt file to my friend for Christmas.
Is there anything I should be worried about? Bear in mind that this is true beginner Ziggy you are talking to, not some smart error checking ASM guy.
EDIT More specifically, since I will be leaving this program on all night counting primes, is there any chance at all that I will encounter some kind of memory related error? Like, stacks crushing heaps or dogs and cats sleeping together?
EDIT even more specifically, is there a line of code I could put in to stop the printing of lines when the file's size is 4GB? Just to be safe?
EDIT: success: after leaving it on all night I got no more than 13 KB of primes, The highest I got was 22947217, which is like tens of thousands of primes. Success!
More than likely you are using an algorithm that is slow. As the primes get larger your program will be taking longer and longer to calculate a single prime. If you let it run over night the text file is not going to be very large in the morning. I'd be impressed if it's over a couple of megs.