Re: Ada / Boeing 777

[digitig@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Tim Rowe")]

sam harbaugh said

> Point of order:  heading zero is invalid in the user space.  north-south
> runways are marked 36 for 360 degrees, not zero.  Pilots and ATC speak 
> of
> 360 degrees, not zero degrees.

Well, that proves I'm not an air traffic controller or a pilot, though I 
should have remembered it from a review I did with a pilot of an aircraft 
distress system :-) IIRC the reports I read spoke of a heading of "due 
North" (which I took to be magnetic, BTW).

[snip]
> Just maybe, just possibly maybe, if the code was written in a strongly 
> typed
> language, using human readable names, and a pilot attended a code
> walkthrough, the pilot would have picked up on type heading_type being 
> from
> 0..359 instead of 1..360 and started a conversation that would have 
> lead to
> discovery of the worong way turn.
> 
> I wonder what language would provide this feature :-)

Oh, Pascal, Modula2... :-)

I'd have wanted it picked up at a specification review (as it was on the 
distress system I mentioned, BTW), rather than a code walkthrough, BTW. 
Even with machine readable names it can be hard to find pilots with the 
right experience to join in code walkthroughs. Magic numbers like 359 or 
360 shouldn't pop up in such code without having been reviewed in a spec 
document AFAICS.

digiTig
(Tim Rowe)