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From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Elias_Salom=E3o_Helou_Neto?= <eshneto@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: How would Ariane 5 have behaved if overflow checking were not turned
 off?
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 08:49:10 -0700 (PDT)
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Date: 2011-03-14T08:49:10-07:00
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I have followed the (quite lenghty) on a topic, IIRC, about bitwise
operators, which eventually lead to people mentioning the Ariane 5
case.

Since then I have been wondering. If compiler checking where actually
turned on, what would have happened? How could it avoid the disaster?

Right now I think of three possibilities, the two former seem very
unlikely to me.

a) It would, even if the problem went undetected during testing, have
made the developers actually develop code handling this exceptional
possibility.

b) The compiler default action for unhandled overflows have saved the
day;

c) Developers would probably ignore the exceptional flow path and the
disaster would happen anyway.

Which one, if any, is close to reality?