Hello, I'm working on a Pyramid Problem. I got it working, but it took a huge amount of time. How should I tackle a problem like this in the future. I don't think it should have taken me 4 hours but I had the most horrible time getting the formatting correct.
Here's my finished code. My initial thinking was to find the total number of spaces needed for a set number of lines, divide it by half and then add one to align the X's correctly but I got hung up on calculating numspaces. I figured it out experimentally but the process took a lot of rebuilding and time and I know there's gotta be a better way. What I don't understand is why I needed to multiply the number of lines by 2 and add 2 to get it aligning correctly. The way I figured it out was by doing a for loop adding up num_x for several varying number of lines and figuring out the conversion for lines to space. Any helps much appreciated.
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char* argv)
{
int numlines=20;
int numspaces=numlines*2+2;
int num_x=1;
for(int row=0; row<numlines; row++)
{
for (int j=0; j<((numspaces - num_x+1)/2); j++)
cout << " ";
for (int i=0; i<(num_x); i++)
cout << "X";
num_x+=2;
cout << endl;
}
system("PAUSE");
return 0;
}