Re: A new name for software failure : the glitch

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:56:11 +0200, Georg Bauhaus  
<rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> a écrit:

> On 10.08.12 14:42, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
>> On 8/4/2012 1:18 PM, francois_fabien@hotmail.com wrote:
>>> In finance, software failure can be very expensive very fast.
>>> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-trading-mishap-cost-it-440-million/
>>>
>>>
>>
>> fyi;
>>
>> AdaCore issued statement on this error:
>>
>> August 07, 2012
>>
>> http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20120807006365/en/AdaCore/Knight-Capital-Group/high-frequency-trading
>>
>>
>> some quotes
>>
>> "It's clear that Knight's software was deployed without adequate  
>> verification."
>>
>> "What is needed is a change in the way that such critical software
>> is developed and deployed."
>>
>> "the aviation industry has demonstrated that safe, reliable real-time
>> software is possible, practical, and necessary"
>>
>> May be this is a good chance for Ada to get into financial software,  
>> which
>> is now dominated by weakly typed and much less robust languages.
>
> Tricky. Neither Java nor OCaml can be called weakly typed
> or not robust. APL implementations do not count as not robust
> either, AFAIK. And, as the article mentions, it is not even clear
> yet whether *any* formal verification software could have
> prevented the effect;

So the reason resides in specifications?

> from what I know, it is more likely an algorithmic error that might have
> to do with "<=" and ">"

You told either too much or not enough :-D

-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University