> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:19:40 -0500
> From: Peter Shenkin <[log in to unmask]>
> On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, 8:03pm -0000, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> > On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Richard Maine wrote:
>
> > > > ADA still being seriously used?
> > > Yes. Very much so. Mostly in a pretty limited application domain...
>
> > Indeed. You may recall the failure of ESA's first Ariane-5 rocket: the
> > failure to handle an overflow exception properly in ADA was one of the
> > chain of mistakes which caused the rocket to blow up.
>
> Of course, that never would have happened had they written it
> in Fortran. :-)
Unlikely, because Fortran then did not include error-handling facilities
(though in some systems as an extension).
What was required was a specific software test for overflow.
Such a test was omitted because they considered that it was unnecessary.
This was the blunder that they made.
> -P.
>
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