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From: Phil Thornley <phil.jpthornley@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Bug rate and choice of programming language
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:53:25 -0700 (PDT)
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On 10 Aug, 14:22, Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homep...@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> This page seems to refer to some paper with an assessment of
> programming languages for safety critical systems with the conclusion
> that the choice of programming language has little impact on the
> resulting bug rate and what actually matters is the programmer's
> fluency in using it.
[...]
> References to other research results in this domain would be highly
> welcome. The above paper alone is very suggestive, but certainly not
> exhaustive.

There's this paper in CrossTalk, from 2003 - which comes to very
different conclusions to Les Hatton's paper (see the table about 2/3
into the paper).
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2003/11/0311german.html

"Table 1 shows that the poorest language for safety-critical
applications is C with consistently high anomaly rates. The best
language found is SPARK (Ada), which consistently achieves one anomaly
per 250 software lines of code. The average number of safety-critical
anomalies found is a small percentage of the overall anomalies found
with about 1 percent identified as having safety implications.
Automatically generated code was found to have considerably reduced
syntactic and data flow errors."

Cheers,

Phil