Re: Ariane5 FAQ

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:
> It was if you see this value something is bad wrong,
 > and maybe it can be figured out from a data dump.

But the Ariane 4 code was not written such that a value
exceeding the assumed Ariane 4 range would cause such a
dump. The code was written to assume that the value would
not be exceeded, and to let the code do whatever it might
if the value was exceeded. A value between the spec max
and the overflow min would (probably) not have caused such
a dump.

The code did "what it was designed to do" only on an Ariane 4.
On the Ariane 5, it did not do "what it was designed to do"
because the design did not cover out of range values. If the
design had covered such values, it would not have specified
one behavior for small large values and a different behavior
for large large values.