Re: How would Ariane 5 have behaved if overflow checking were notturned off?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Martin Krischik:

> Am 16.03.2011, 11:41 Uhr, schrieb robin <robin51@dodo.com.au>:
>
>> That was the major blunder that they made,
>> namely, treating a programming error as a hardware error.
>
> Let me repeat: There was no programming error. The software was
> correct for the Ariane 4. If at all it was a deployment or management
> error in  installing Ariane 4 software on the Ariane 5.

How many committee meetings do you need during the development of the
software that this is no longer considered programming error?

If I take a piece of code, say from a Stackoverflow discussion, and
paste it into the project I'm working on, and it later crashes, I
doubt anyone would *not* consider this a programming error.  Even if I
had a manager that told me to use that code, I would still consider it
my fault that I didn't integrate it properly.

If you take an extremely narrow view of programming, treating it as
the supposedly mechanical conversion from a (semi)formal specification
to input which can be processed by a given compiler, then this might
not be considered a programming error.  But programming is not a
mechanical activity, and programmers are expected to notice such
problems and address them before the code ships.  Of course, in large
systems, with compartmentalized design and development, it is
unreasonable to expect that they can do this in all cases, hence my
reference to committee meetings.