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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:56:11 +0200
From: Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Subject: Re: A new name for software failure : the glitch
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Date: 2012-08-10T15:55:19+02:00
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On 10.08.12 14:42, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
> On 8/4/2012 1:18 PM, francois_fabien@hotmail.com wrote:
>> In finance, software failure can be very expensive very fast.
>> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-trading-mishap-cost-it-440-million/
>>
>>
> 
> fyi;
> 
> AdaCore issued statement on this error:
> 
> August 07, 2012
> 
> http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20120807006365/en/AdaCore/Knight-Capital-Group/high-frequency-trading
> 
> 
> some quotes
> 
> "It's clear that Knight's software was deployed without adequate verification."
> 
> "What is needed is a change in the way that such critical software
> is developed and deployed."
> 
> "the aviation industry has demonstrated that safe, reliable real-time
> software is possible, practical, and necessary"
> 
> May be this is a good chance for Ada to get into financial software, which
> is now dominated by weakly typed and much less robust languages.

Tricky. Neither Java nor OCaml can be called weakly typed
or not robust. APL implementations do not count as not robust
either, AFAIK. And, as the article mentions, it is not even clear
yet whether *any* formal verification software could have
prevented the effect;
from what I know, it is more likely an algorithmic error that might have
to do with "<=" and ">", not so much with type systems, or with other
qualities of programming languages.

AdaCore uses this opportunity to point out offerings that
are related to reliability and verification, but does not
specifically mention Ada.

Saying "Ada would have prevented" might turn out to be rather silly in
this case.