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-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!h8g2000yqm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Martin Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ariane 5 Failure from 1996 Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:04:21 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <851f477d-c5a4-4c87-b930-4a47ba508579@h8g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 86.145.133.138 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1247238261 6443 127.0.0.1 (10 Jul 2009 15:04:21 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:04:21 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: h8g2000yqm.googlegroups.com; posting-host=86.145.133.138; posting-account=g4n69woAAACHKbpceNrvOhHWViIbdQ9G User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.0.10, Ant.com Toolbar 1.3,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:6942 Date: 2009-07-10T08:04:21-07:00 List-Id: On Jul 10, 3:53=A0pm, John McCabe wrote: > Dear All > > The other day, some geezer who was presenting to me claimed that > someone had carried out an analysis to show that, had the Ariane 5 > software been written in C, the first launch would have succeeded. > > Are any of you aware of this claim and have information to debunk > this? > > Thanks > John Not aware of this claim and it's entirely hypothetical - you could argue that if the C programmers had been 'average' C programmers, it might not have got to the launch pad! My understanding of the Ariane pretty slim but if Wikipedia is accurate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5) then it seems likely that the same error would have occurred, as my reading is that it was the deliberate removal of Ada checks that led to the 32-bit Float being assigned to a 16-bit value, i.e. that part was C-in-Ada-syntax. Cheers -- Martin