Re: Would You Fly an Airplane with a Linux-Based Control System?

[Jeffrey Carter <spam@spam.com>]

Marius Amado Alves wrote:

> No. This whole talk of hardware-generated exception sounds like "FUD". 
> Namely, it sounds like your trying to blame the hardware. The cause was 
> a SOFTWARE enginering error. Yes, a BUG. In the Ada software. And 
> because it's connected to exceptions, the hypothesis that if the thing 
> had been done in an exceptionless language like C the effect might have 
> been different. And yes, maybe less bad. And none of the explanations 
> I've seen so far (here, in books, and in the Internet) disprove this 
> hypothesis.

I think you're mistaken. "Hardware-generated exception", "signal", 
"interrupt", whatever you call it, this comes from the hardware and must 
be handled regardless of the language used for the SW. Since the 
behavior of the Ada SW was exactly that specified for this situation, 
and the specification would have been the same regardless of the 
language used, the choice of language would not have changed the 
behavior of the SW.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"There's no messiah here. There's a mess all right, but no messiah."
Monty Python's Life of Brian
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