I'm told you are never to old to learn something new but right now I don't believe that. I thought I understood this but the program I wrote just doesn't work any suggestions?


Write a program that asks the user to enter the price of an item and the sales tax rate as a percent. The program should display th total price of the item (price plus sales tax) After obtaining the input from the user, the program should use the *= operator to calculate the total price of the item using the equivalent of the following formula
price=price*( 1 +sales_tax_rate)


//This program calculates Total price of the item (price+sales tax).

#include <iostream.h>
#include<iomanip.h>


//using namespace std;
int main()

{
const price*=sales_tax_rate,
price of item,
sales_tax,
total;
//Display price of item
cout<<"\n Enter the price of the item;
cin>> item_price

//calculate tax
sales_tax=item price*sales_tax_rate;
total= item_price + sales_tax;

//Display price and total
cout<<"\n price of item" <<item_price;
cout<<"\nsales tax" <<sales_tax;
cout<<"\n total amount<<total;

return 0;

}

Greetings,

There are a few syntatical errors in your program. Let's walk through them one step at a time.

Point A
First issue is the local variables themselves. Nothing major, it can be fixed. Let's look at what we have: Alright, this may cause a few errors if not a ton. I see you declared price as a constant variable that equals sales_tax_rate, though there is no trace of such a variable here. Of course you are initializing a constant variable for the rest without a data type. Since prices and percentages work with decimals alot, lets make these variables floating-type variables: All four variables are floats. The last variable, sales_tax_rate is 8.1% in decimal style, or 0.81. The f is there to tell the compiler this is a float not a double. That is on an enitrely different topic, so lets move to the next step.

Point B
Secondly we need to input from the user to store in our float item_price. This is easy: As you may see we used cout and cin. Each ending with a semi-colon to break that lines worth of code. Without that semi-colon, the next line may whine about how a computation that started never ended.

Point C
Here we calculate our tax by multiplying the items price by the tax rate we set as 0.81.
This is quite simple. The equation is set to sales_tax, and the total adds it to the price, etc...

Of course we just display it now: If you have further questions, please feel free to ask.


- Stack Overflow

not to mention that your "using namespace std;" at the top is commented out. Also, relating to stack's comment on syntax, there are a few lines with commas at the end rather than semicolons.

happy coding & don't give up!
And remember, your head stops hurting after you stop beating it off the wall.
ok, seriously, anything worth doing was ever learned overnight.