Re: Ariane 5 Failure from 1996

[John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk>]

On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:04:21 -0700 (PDT), Martin
<martin.dowie@btopenworld.com> wrote:

>On Jul 10, 3:53�pm, John McCabe <j...@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Dear All
>>
>> The other day, some geezer who was presenting to me claimed that
>> someone had carried out an analysis to show that, had the Ariane 5
>> software been written in C, the first launch would have succeeded.
>>
>> Are any of you aware of this claim and have information to debunk
>> this?
>>
>> Thanks
>> John
>
>Not aware of this claim and it's entirely hypothetical - you could
>argue that if the C programmers had been 'average' C programmers, it
>might not have got to the launch pad!

That was the general view of me and one other non-anti-Ada person in
the room :-)

>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

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.