From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: a07f3367d7,20280f498071efd3,start X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,CP1252 Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!m27g2000prl.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Jerry Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Software Quality in Science Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 13:20:23 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1198a288-b013-45a8-907f-7fe227e6294e@m27g2000prl.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 75.172.187.95 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1265750423 6375 127.0.0.1 (9 Feb 2010 21:20:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2010 21:20:23 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: m27g2000prl.googlegroups.com; posting-host=75.172.187.95; posting-account=x5rpZwoAAABMN2XPwcebPWPkebpwQNJG User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16+(KHTML, like Gecko, Safari/528.16) OmniWeb/v622.8.0,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:9050 Date: 2010-02-09T13:20:23-08:00 List-Id: Here is an interesting article on software quality in science: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-cod= e-release >From the article: "There is enough evidence for us to regard a lot of scientific software with worry. For example Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in software testing resident in the Universities of Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive analysis of several million lines of scientific code. He showed that the software had an unacceptably high level of detectable inconsistencies. "For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error =97 just one =97 will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs. "Hatton and other researchers' work indicates that scientific software is often of poor quality. What is staggering about the research that has been done is that it examines commercial scientific software =96 produced by software engineers who have to undergo a regime of thorough testing, quality assurance and a change control discipline known as configuration management. "By contrast scientific software developed in our universities and research institutes is often produced by scientists with no training in software engineering and with no quality mechanisms in place and so, no doubt, the occurrence of errors will be even higher." For several years, I have used Ada for as much of my engineering research as I can, having switched from Pascal and having dumped FORTRAN many years ago (although it was my first language). Ada offers the same advantages in this application as in other applications. However, in my experience, Ada is hampered by having limited support for standard and popular libraries such as the GNU Scientific Library. (Feel free to add your own favorite library which is not supported by Ada.) Jerry