Re: Ada vs Fortran for scientific applications

["Jan Vorbrüggen" <jvorbrueggen@not-mediasec.de>]

> Clearly, Ariane 5's case is not representative of the vast
> bulk of real-world code.

Quite to the contrary - almost all of the world's code is in embedded
systems, Winwoes notwithstanding.

But I believe you are overinterpreting what I said. What I wanted to say
is that error detection without corrective action is not the panacea it
is sometimes made out to be. In the case of Ariane 501, the correct approach
IMO would have been to have a test mode (with detection) and a flight mode,
which turns on the "let's hope and pray" handling of errors and is reserved
for use only on actual launches. In other cases  - e.g., my SAT receiver
or similar system - the best approach probably is to do a warm reboot and,
after a certain number of recurrences, a cold reboot. That, again, can lead
to a denial-of-service attack: Some older Siemens mobile phones have a bug
in parsing the header data of SMS (the code assumes that violations of the
standardized format cannot happen), which allows a perpretator to send you
an SMS that will disable your phone until you manage to delete the offending
SMS on a phone that does not have the bug.

In summary, error detection is similar to asking a girl out on a date: you
should think beforehand of what you'll do if the says "yes".

	Jan