How can I test for primality?

Question

I am writing a little library with some prime number related methods. As I\'ve done the groundwork (aka working methods) and now I\'m looking for some optimization. Ofcours

Answer 1

In case anyone else is interested, here's my conversion of Mohammad's procedure above to VBA. I added a check to exclude 1, 0, and negative numbers as they are all defined as not prime.

I have only tested this in Excel VBA:

Function IsPrime(input_num As Long) As Boolean
    Dim i As Long
    If input_num < 2 Then '1, 0, and negative numbers are all defined as not prime.
        IsPrime = False: Exit Function
    ElseIf input_num = 2 Then
        IsPrime = True: Exit Function '2 is a prime
    ElseIf input_num = 3 Then
        IsPrime = True: Exit Function '3 is a prime.
    ElseIf input_num Mod 2 = 0 Then
        IsPrime = False: Exit Function 'divisible by 2, so not a prime.
    ElseIf input_num Mod 3 = 0 Then
        IsPrime = False: Exit Function 'divisible by 3, so not a prime.
    Else
        'from here on, we only need to check for factors where
        '6k ± 1 = square root of input_num:
        i = 5
        Do While i * i <= input_num
            If input_num Mod i = 0 Then
                IsPrime = False: Exit Function
            ElseIf input_num Mod (i + 2) = 0 Then
                IsPrime = False: Exit Function
            End If
            i = i + 6
        Loop
        IsPrime = True
    End If
End Function