The factorial of a number N is the total product of all numbers from 1 to that number in other words it multiplies all whole numbers from our chosen number down to 1. The notation used for factorial is '!' and the formula used is n! =n * (n-1) * (n-2) *... To understand this concept clearly, some examples are given below in the picture.
Note: The factorial of zero is defined as one ie., 0 ! = 1
Here in this R program, we make use of if...else conditional statements and for loop. First, we accept a number as the user's input into the variable number by providing an appropriate message to the user using the 'prompt' inside the readLine() function.
The factorial is defined for only positive integers, so first check the entered number is positive, if not display it's a negative integer. Now check If the number is zero then display the factorial as 1. Now for a positive integer, start a for loop from i= 1 to that number and multiply each 'i value' with the 'factorial' in every iteration to get the final result of that number. Finally, show output to the user.
STEP 1: Prompting appropriate messages to the user take user input using readline() into a variable
STEP 2: Check if the number is negative, zero, or positive using if...else statement
STEP 3: If the number is positive, we use for loop to calculate the factorial as factorial = factorial x i till i = 1 to number
STEP 4: Print the result
If you are interested to learn this R program using recursion, please refer to this factorial program using recursion.
number = as.integer(readline(prompt="Enter a number: "))
factorial = 1
# check is the number is negative, positive or zero
if(number < 0) {
print("Sorry, factorial does not exist for negative numbers")
} else if(number == 0) {
print("The factorial of 0 is 1")
} else {
for(i in 1:number) {
factorial = factorial * i
}
print(paste("The factorial of", number ,"is",factorial))
}
Enter a number: -5 [1] "Sorry, factorial does not exist for negative numbers" Enter a number: 0 [1] "The factorial of 0 is 1" Enter a number: 8 [1] "The factorial of 8 is 40320"
