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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Papers on the Ariane-5 crash and Design by Contract
Date: 1997/03/26
Message-ID: <dewar.859383570@merv>#1/1
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.eiffel,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.programming.threads,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-03-26T00:00:00+00:00
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Ken Garlington said

<<I am totally confused now. The Ariane V incident could only have been
prevented by a language that has Eiffel-like constructs, but it wasn't
the language's fault?>>

No one said anything completely silly like that! Ken you are putting words
into someone else's mouth. The most that has been said is something like
"systematic use of xxxx would have prevented the Ariane V incident"

That is a statement that is highly NON-contentious, since it is true for
almost all possible xxxx including
"common sense".

The trouble is that when people start replacing xxxx with specific language
features, it is only to easy to read the statement as saying that the
particular choice of xxxx is somehow the only one or at least a key one.

I have no problem with the statement above with "Eiffel assertions" or
"Programming by Contract" inserted for the xxxx, but the suggestion that
only these approaches would be appropriate, or even that in this case they
have some special advantage would be respectively absurd or dubious. The
first allegation simply has not been made in this thread. Some people have
made the second, and I find the argument dubious. The Ariane V goof is not
a particularly instructive one from a language or methodology point of view.