Bruno Desthuilliers <bdesth.quelquech...@free.quelquepart.fr> writes: > Once again, there's quite a lot to learn from > the story of Ariane 5.
Do you know what actually happened with Ariane 5? The failure was because "smart" humans overrode the language enforced protection by casting a floating point number down to a 16-bit integer, which worked ok in Ariane 4, but failed with an overflow on Ariane 5 where bigger numbers were involved. The actual code fragment is here, and you can see where the error is suppressed: http://www-aix.gsi.de/~giese/swr/ariane5.html This is one thing that Python gets right, automatically using bignums rather than allowing int overflow. In that sense, Python has more enforced protection than Ada. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
