TOOLS Europe and USA calls for papers on line

TOOLS Europe and USA calls for papers on line

[Bertrand Meyer]

Up-to-date versions of the calls for papers for

	TOOLS EUROPE 1997 (12-15 May 1997, Paris)
	TOOLS USA 1997 (28 July - 1 August 1997, Santa Barbara)

are available at

	http://www.tools.com

Both conferences (Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and
Systems) will place a special emphasis this year on objects and
the Internet.

For both conferences, there is still time to submit a paper;
check the CFPs for details.


-- 
Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE eiffelsoft, Santa Barbara (California)
805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <bertrand@eiffel.com> -
ftp://ftp.eiffel.com
Visit our Web page: http://www.eiffel.com (WITH FRAMES)
	or http://www.eiffel.com/noframes.html

Re: IEEE Computer article on Ariane 5

[Ken Garlington]

On the whole, I agreed with much of what was said in the subject
article.
However, there are a few points to consider:

1. It may be misleading to say that the Ariane IRS did not "handle" the
exception.
As I read the report, it was handled in a higher level exception
handler, at which
time an "orderly" shutdown of the IRS was intentionally performed. This
action was
consistent with the view that a failure of this type was more likely a
hardware
failure than a software design fault.

2. It's unclear to me whether the explicit declaration of the conversion
assumption
in the source code would have been any better from a documentation
standpoint. The error was only obvious once the differences between the
Ariane 4 and 5 flight profiles were
understood. Based on my experience, it's unlikely that the engineer
writing the IRS
software would have been privy to this knowledge. More likely, a systems
engineer at
Arianespace would have this information. Unfortunately, it is probable
that a systems
engineer on a project like this is reading more compact and higher-level
documentation than
the IRS subcontractor's source code. As a result, documentation in the
source code would
have been quite "obscure" -- to the person who could have challenged the
assumption.

3. I also am less than convinced that having the assumption tested at
run time would
have improved the situation. Putting aside the obvious reluctance of the
IRS subcontractor
to add such a test (based on their not using the available Ada exception
mechanism), what
would they have done with the _results_ of such a test? Most likely,
they would have
logged it, and then raised the exception to the global handler --
exactly what happened
in the actual flight. In other words, the mind set of the IRS
subcontractor would most
likely have led to choosing the wrong reaction to the test, even if they
had included it.

Overall, I disagree Eiffel's approach to programming by contract would
have significantly
improved the odds of catching this problem prior to flight. Despite your
assertion that this was more a technical than a management issue, I
believe that this was very much a case of humans making mistakes in
judgement, under the normal pressure to reduce costs and meet schedules.
Given that the reuse was done at the system ("black-box") level, rather
than at
the source code level, the only way to detect this faulty assumption
once it was made
would have been via an integrated system test with realistic flight data
for the Ariane 5.
This is standard practice for a critical aerospace system; not doing
such a test for the
Ariane 5 based on over-confidence in the reused system was, IMHO, the
most disasterous of
all the mistakes made in this episode.

Re: TOOLS Europe and USA calls for papers on line

[Richard Riehle]

From:    Richard Riehle
To:      comp.lang.ada
Subject: Tools Conference Call for Papers

First, a disclaimer. I have no financial interest in this conference
though I have agreed to be a member of the Program Committee for
Tools USA.  

I would like to plug this conference. During the past several years
that I have attended it, I have found it to be technically excellent
as well as a good place to engage in dialogue with serious 
practitioners in object technology.  One of the things I like about
Tools USA is that is one of those rare conferences which
has not turned into a circus dominated by sales people selling to
other salespeople.

Now that Ada is a full-fledged OOP language, it would make sense for
those in the Ada commmunity with original work that contributes to the
wider understanding of object technology to consider submitting
papers.  In particular, it would seem to be appropriate to see original
papers on object technology for safe-software and the role of object
technology for real-time and concurrency.  

Keep in mind that this is a referreed conference. Papers are evaluated
for originality, technical excellence, and clarity of presentation. I
hope to see some of the leaders from the Ada community contibuting to
the already high quality of this conference in the future.

On Sun, 5 Jan 1997, Bertrand Meyer wrote:

> Up-to-date versions of the calls for papers for
> 
> 	TOOLS EUROPE 1997 (12-15 May 1997, Paris)
> 	TOOLS USA 1997 (28 July - 1 August 1997, Santa Barbara)
> 
> are available at
> 
> 	http://www.tools.com
> 
> Both conferences (Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and
> Systems) will place a special emphasis this year on objects and
> the Internet.
> 
> For both conferences, there is still time to submit a paper;
> check the CFPs for details.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Bertrand Meyer, President, ISE eiffelsoft, Santa Barbara (California)
> 805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, <bertrand@eiffel.com> -
> ftp://ftp.eiffel.com
> Visit our Web page: http://www.eiffel.com (WITH FRAMES)
> 	or http://www.eiffel.com/noframes.html
> 
> 

Re: TOOLS Europe and USA calls for papers on line

[Ada Jobs]

Richard Riehle wrote:
 
       "TOOLS EUROPE 1997 (12-15 May 1997, Paris)
        TOOLS USA 1997 (28 July - 1 August 1997, Santa Barbara)"

Richard,

TOOLS EUROPE 1997 and TOOLS USA 1997 have been added to the Software
Engineering Information Clearinghouse (AdaIC) calendar web page at:
http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/docs/flyers/calndr.shtml

Julie Morton
Ada Information Clearinghouse
mortonj@sw-eng.falls-church.va.us