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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: How would Ariane 5 have behaved if overflow checking were
 notturned off?
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:39:31 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2011-03-20T14:39:31-04:00
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Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> writes:

>...  The real cause
> of the problem, of course, was taking software that works correctly
> on the Ariane 4 and running it on the Ariane 5 without modification.

That matches my understanding exactly.  Without modification, and
without even having some programmers check whether modifications were
necessary.

So it seems that all discussion of the proximate cause of failure
is irrelevant.  If the software had been different, it might have
worked in Ariane 5, or it might not.  If it worked, it would
have been purely by accident, since the programmers had never heard
of an Ariane 5 at the time they wrote the software.

- Bob