From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news3.google.com!proxad.net!feeder1-2.proxad.net!news.cs.univ-paris8.fr!gegeweb.org!aioe.org!nospam From: "John B. Matthews" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ariane 5 Failure from 1996 Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:17:59 -0400 Organization: The Wasteland Message-ID: References: <851f477d-c5a4-4c87-b930-4a47ba508579@h8g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ib4TTflHUauJidfWP/+Rjw.user.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.7.9 Cancel-Lock: sha1:WSgPtjlPyxS9Ud3tPWEbKJNKzuA= User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b3 (Intel Mac OS X) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:6953 Date: 2009-07-10T14:17:59-04:00 List-Id: In article , John McCabe wrote: > On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:04:21 -0700 (PDT), Martin > wrote: [...] > >My understanding of the Ariane pretty slim but if Wikipedia is > >accurate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5) then it seems > >likely that the same error would have occurred, as my reading is > >that it was the deliberate removal of Ada checks that led to the > >32-bit Float being assigned to a 16-bit value, i.e. that part was > >C-in-Ada-syntax. > > Interestingly enough, it is claimed in this article by the presenter, > with no reference as far as I can see to back up the claim. > > http://www.two-sdg.demon.co.uk/curbralan/papers/MindYourLanguage.pdf The author may have meant to cite "ARIANE 5 Flight 501 Failure Report by the Inquiry Board" in reference 7, but the link is invalid: An archive may be found here: > To me the whole section on Ada sounds like a typical spiel from > someone who really doesn't know Ada and has picked up a load of > anti-Ada propaganda from a number of disparate sources. The article claims, "had the system been written in C, the disaster would probably never have happened!" That conclusion is unsupported in the article. In contrast, I never get tired of reading Ian Joyner's "C++??", which I'd forgotten has a whole section on C: -- John B. Matthews trashgod at gmail dot com