Why Does This While Loop With A Condition Hang?-CodePudding

Important Updates: Code line 12 changed from "universalTracker 2" to "universalTracker = 2"

I'm doing the adjacentElementsProduct challenge on CodeSignal, and it's asking me to create a function that shows the highest product from each adjacent pair of numbers in the list. I wrote this, and I can't seem to find what's wrong with it. Once I press run in VSCode, it just hangs. I have to force quit the program.

def adjacentElementsProduct(inputArray):
    highestProduct = 0
    universalTracker = 0
    firstNum = inputArray[universalTracker]
    secondNum = inputArray[universalTracker   1]
    arrayLength = len(inputArray)

    while universalTracker != (arrayLength - 1):
        currentProduct = firstNum * secondNum
        if currentProduct > highestProduct:
            highestProduct = currentProduct
        universalTracker  = 2

adjacentElementsProduct([3, 6, -2, -5, 7, 3])

If anyone could give me an explanation as to what I did wrong, a working solution, and why it works, I would greatly appreciate it.

CodePudding user response：

If you notice, you are doing the following inside the while loop.

universalTracker   2

This isn't really updating the variable that you intended to update.

To make it work, you should do

universalTracker = universalTracker 2

Or equivalently

universalTracker  = 2

CodePudding user response：

It's simple Just change while loop condition to

while universalTracker >= (arrayLength - 1):

Because, let's say your array length is 5, and universalTracker is updating by 2, it won't be equal to 5 It will be 2,4,6,8,10,12 ... and so on.

Let me know if this makes sense..