Re: Ariane Failure

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Given infinite processor speed and infinite memory, they might have done a
whole lot with the software to make it more flexible and safe. But that sort
of sounds like doing engineering in Heaven. :-) These sorts of compromises
are made all the time in real world engineering and you have to ask if they
were reasonable for the conditions at hand.

In my mind, the decisions made by the Ariane 4 engineers in designing their
software were very similar to the decisions made by data processing
programmers years ago in using only two digits to store a year - thus
creating The Great Y2K Disaster. Back in the 70's & 80's, they were
confronted with smaller storage devices and saving those extra couple of
bytes in every date was important. The thinking at the time was "Its a known
limitation and the useful life of this software ought to be something less
than twenty years, so when they build the next system they can accommodate
4-digit years..." I thought that was a reasonable compromise in order to
deal with the constraints of technology at the time. Even though hardware
and resources get more abundant in the future, we'll still be making
compromises - just different ones.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Michael Feathers" <mfeathers@objectmentor.com> wrote in message
news:a84f5p$nlm$1@slb5.atl.mindspring.net...
>
> Yes.  It seems like the error prone part is going back to integers at all.
> Since it is a safety consideration it seems like it would be great to
> revisit that as processing and communications speeds increase.
>