Purpose of "return -1"
Hello,
I am running Professor Giles's solution. I am not sure what the purpose is of "return -1". If I remove "return -1" or change -1 to some other number, the function still runs and the solutions shown for the following are still the same.
L = [8,6,11,3]
print(two_sum(L,9))
L2 = [2,5,3,7,4]
print(two_sum(L2,10))
print(two_sum([3, 3], 6))
1 answers ( 0 marked as helpful)
Hey Abbie,
Thank you for reaching out!
The function returns -1 if it doesn't find a pair of numbers that sum up to the desired result. For example, the input
L = [8,6,11,3]
print(two_sum(L,9))
would return -1. The choice of "-1" is arbitrary but often used in programming when you expect your function to return a positive number.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
365 Hristina