On Mon, 1 Mar 2004, Robin wrote:
> Not really. The oveflowed integer may have appeared as
> having a changed sign (with a nonsensical numerical value)
> or a small positive value of the same sign.
> In either case, the magnitude would have been nonsensical.
> Without a specific action to deal with that, the mission
> was very likely still doomed.
If you re-read the report you will see that the code where the overflow
occurred wasn't needed except before launch, when the overflow would not
happen. So in this case a Fortran implementation would have been better.
Sorry to be pedantic, and I agree that Ada is better because it has an
exception-handling, but in this particular case...
--
Clive Page,
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester, U.K.
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