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From: "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: status of PL/I as a viable language
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 13:27:43 -0600
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"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:HVDh3osH+3al@eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article
<42EA55F4BE83950E.F1DA277C2FDC157B.C804C1C52FE95D65@lp.airnews.net>, "John
R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> writes:
>
> > Are you trying to say you DON'T want to catch those "gross errors of
> > coding - buffer overruns, null pointer accesses, arithmetic overflow,
etc."?
> >
> > Any one of those "gross errors of coding" can and will crash an embedded
> > system, or, worse, cause it to fail in a bad way.  It was an overflowed
> > counter that caused a Patriot battery not to engage an incoming Scud,
> > resulting in the deaths of several U.S. servicemen.
>
> Can you provide a citation for that incident ?

This is from memory, twelve years ago.

Operation Desert Storm, near the end of the party, when Saddam Hussein was
lobbing Scuds and the U.S. was going crazy trying to find all of his Scud
launchers.  Incoming Scud detected, Patriot failed to engage, missile hit,
destroying (as I recall) a warehouse tent or a barracks tent, killing some
twenty troops.  Investigation showed that a timer had overflowed.  The
Patriot system designers assumed that the system would never be operated for
more than a few hours at a time, and the timer couldn't overflow in that
time.  This particular one had been up for several days.