On 12/09/2015 17:29, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
On Sat, 12 Sep 2015 05:11:46 +0100, Mario Figueiredo <mar...@gmx.com>
declaimed the following:
On 12-09-2015 03:35, Mark Lawrence wrote:
Ada took over from CORAL in the UK, at least in military projects. It
was also used in the aircraft industry. My old work mates tell me that
its completely died a death, to be replaced by C++. Someone please
remind me never to fly again.
Alright. But then someone should probably have reminded you that a long
time ago.
Maybe you missed it when an Ada integer overflow bug produced one of the
most expensive software bugs in history by crashing the Ariane 501
rocket and its 4 cluster sattelites payload.
As I recall, the software did exactly what it was supposed to do in
that situation...
But no one had tested the algorithm with the rate of change the Ariane
5 could produce -- so an algorithm that was developed for, and safe with,
the smaller Ariane suddenly went "something's wrong -- abandon ship"
Nothing inherent in the language...
Well if the backup system that took over when the primary system gave up
the ghost had used a different algorithm, and had been tested for an
appropriate range of inputs, we wouldn't be having this discussion. It
didn't. The rest is history, and very expensive history at that.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
