Problem with loop in C

Question

i'm trying to compute "2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + ... + 2^14", using the following program(i'm a newbie and can only compute a exponent by multiply itself a certain times). The result should be 32767, but i ran it and got 270566475, i thought for long but can't figure out why...

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
   int i, e, exponent, sum;

   e = 1;
   exponent = 1;
   sum = 1;

   for (i = 1; i <=14; i++)
   {
       for (e = 1; e <= i; e++)
       {
          exponent *= 2;
       }

       sum += exponent;
   }

   printf("%d\n", sum);

   return 0;
}

So what's wrong with this??? Thanks!!!

Answer 1

You don't need the inner loop. Just execute exponent *= 2 once, directly inside the outer loop. BTW, I think you have to do it after the sum += ....

Also, you could start with sum = 0 and i = 0, which is closer to the math you described.

Answer 2

Look at your inner loop by itself. It's trying to calculate, for one specific value of i, 2^i.

But exponent does not start at 1 every time. So you go into that loop with exponent already some very large value.

for (i = 1; i <=14; i++)
{
    exponent = 1;
    for (e = 1; e <= i; e++)
    {
        exponent *= 2;
    }

    sum += exponent;
}

Now you've reset exponent (which, to be clear, isn't the exponent at all but the calculated result) for each new power of 2.