I am surprised that not a single person here had noticed that the guy asked to raise a DOUBLE to a given power. Men, double are not integers. Their exponent is stored in a part of their binary representation. If you multiply n times a double you will make n times a rounding error and n useless calculations. Just changed the binary part of the double that is related to its exponent, and here it is, your double has been raised to a given power, a you absolutely lost no precision, and you've made 0 calculations. This is basic stuff, every university teaches that to its students... floating numbers representation...

TD's answer is interesting, but not very useful. If you actually try it you'll find that since the double's base is 2, any changes to the exponent portion approximately multiply (or divide) numbers by a power of two. I say approximately here, since TD forgot to mention that the number itself isn't stored in float point numbers, only the digits after the implied 1. So yes, it's important to know how floating point numbers work, but modifying the exponent portion of a floating point number is a fundamentally incorrect solution.

I believe interviewer is expecting for this public static double Power(double x, int y) { double result = 1; bool isNegative = y 0) { if ((y & 1) > 0) { result *= x; } y = (y >> 1); x *= x; } if (isNegative) result = 1 / result; return result; }

public double power(double num, int exp) { if(exp == 0) return 1; double res = 1; for(int e=Math.abs(exp);e>0;num*=num,e>>=1) { if( (e&1) == 1) res *= num; } return (exp>0)?res:1.0/res; }

c implementation of the above (no recursion): int ipow(int base, int exp){ int result = 1; while(exp){ if(exp & 1) { result *= exp; } exp >>= 1; base *= base; } return result; }

double power(double x, int y) { if(y == 0) return 1; int sign = 1; if(y < 0) sign = -1; y = abs(y); double d = power(x, y/2); if(y%2 == 0) d = d*d; else d = x*d*d; if(sign == -1) return 1.0/d; else return d; }

C# code verified: static double Power(double d, int exp) { if (d == 0 || exp == 0) { if (exp >= 0) { return 1; } else { return double.PositiveInfinity; } } int expAbs = Math.Abs(exp); double res = d; for (int i = 1; i 0) ? (res) : (1 / res); }

Verified C# static double Pow(double b, double exp) { if (exp == 0) return 1; else if (exp > 0) return b * Pow(b, exp - 1); else return 1 / Pow(b, -exp); } Does it get more compact?

int power(double n, int exp) { bool npower = (exp < 0) ? true : false; double result = 1; exp = abs(exp); // get the absolute value for (int i = 0; i < exp; i++) { if (npower) { result = result/n; } else { result = result*n; } } return result; }

Could be implemented many ways. I got the feeling that the interviewer wanted to see you approach the problem in multiple ways and demonstrate confidence in your math and recursive skills.