PL/SQL CREATE PROCEDURE - factorial - sql

Question

I don't know what's wrong with my code block to create a procedure to find out the factorial of a number. Thank you.
Question 1: write a stored procedure that gets an integer number n and calculates and displays its factorial.
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON;
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE factorial_number(
n NUMBER) AS
factorial NUMBER;
num Number;
BEGIN
FOR i IN REVERSE 1..n LOOP
num := i - 1;
factorial := factorial * num;
END LOOP;
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (factorial);
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS
THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('Error!');
END;
/
BEGIN
factorial_number(5);
END;
/

Answer 1

You're failing to initialize the local variable factorial. Uninitialized variables are initially null and multiplying null by any value produces null.
I don't see why you'd want your loop to go in reverse order. It doesn't matter since multiplication is communitive but it it unlikely to make your code easier to read/ debug/ follow.
You don't want to subtract 1 from the value you are multiplying by on each iteration of the loop. When i = 1, for example, you're multiplying factorial by 0 which means that (assuming you initialize factorial), you'd always end up with 0. You want to multiply by i so there is no need for the local variable num.
If I make those fixes
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE factorial_number(
n NUMBER)
AS
factorial NUMBER := 1; -- Initialize
BEGIN
FOR i IN 1..n LOOP -- Loop normally
dbms_output.put_line( 'Beginning iteration ' || i || ' of loop. ' ||
'Factorial = ' || factorial ||
' multiplying by ' || i );
factorial := factorial * i; -- Multiply by i not i-1
END LOOP;
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (factorial);
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS
THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('Error!');
END;
Then
BEGIN
factorial_number(5);
END;
will print out 120 (5*4*3*2*1).
I'm also adding an additional dbms_output line to print out the current state of the variables on each iteration of the loop. That's a relatively old-school method of debugging. In the modern world, you'd walk through the code with a debugger where you can see the values of your local variables but introductory classes may not teach debugger usage initially.

Answer 2

How about
SQL> CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE factorial_number (n NUMBER)
2 AS
3 factorial NUMBER := 1;
4 BEGIN
5 FOR i IN 1 .. n
6 LOOP
7 factorial := factorial * i;
8 END LOOP;
9
10 DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (factorial);
11 END;
12 /
Procedure created.
SQL>
SQL> BEGIN
2 factorial_number (5);
3 END;
4 /
120
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL>