> What happens when you stick a 32bit float into a 16bit float type in Ada? CONSTRAINT_ERROR. And this could happen at runtime, not compile time. It was Ada's i

> What happens when you stick a 32bit float into a 16bit float type in Ada? CONSTRAINT_ERROR. And this could happen at runtime, not compile time. It was Ada's inability to deal with unknown/incorrect inputs and deal with them in an effective way without crashing. This is not that much different than buffer overflows from unknown inputs in C, btw. That's completely wrong. It was an integer overflow. One that could not happen on Ariane 4 but because of different hardware specs. But that was only the end of the chain of fails that lead to the crash. Ada is of course completely able to handle such a problem. But the programmers evaluated this and consciously decided not to handle it for performance reason and because it shouldn't happen anyway. But it could happen, just only on the Ariane 5. Sorry to be blunt but I don't think you know as much as you think you do. You should read up more on the incident. You could even read the post mortem report. It is available on the net.