C Program to Calculate Hypotenuse

Question

I'm fairly new to coding and am currently learning C. In class I was given an assignment to write a program that calculates the hypotenuse of the triangle by using our own functions. However, there seems to be something wrong with the code that I have written.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>

double hypotenuse(double x, double y, double z);

int main(void) {
    double side1, side2, side3, counter;

    side3 = 1;

    for (counter = 0; counter <= 2; counter++) {
        printf("Enter values for two sides: ");
        scanf_s("%d %d", &side1, &side2);

        printf("%.2f\n", hypotenuse(side1, side2, side3));
    }

    return 0;
}

double hypotenuse(double x, double y, double z) {
    x *= x;
    y *= y;
    z = sqrt(x + y);

    return z;
}

My instructor said that we're allowed to use the square root function sqrt of the math library. The main errors that I'm facing are:

1) side3 is not defined (This is why I just arbitrarily set it to 1, but is there some other way to prevent this error from happening?)
2) If I, for example, inputted 3 and 4 as side1 and side2, then side3 should be 5. However, the printed result is an absurdly long number.

Thank you for the help! Any words of advice are appreciated.

Answer 1

You don't need side3 variable - it is not used in calculation. And you function hypotenuse returns the result, so you can directly output the result of sqrt.