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A language doesn't make code automatically reliable, but it can certainly help. Ada can do overflow checking, so choice of language can have an impact on relia
by markdoubleyou 7y ago
A language doesn't make code automatically reliable, but it can certainly help.
Ada can do overflow checking, so choice of language can have an impact on reliability, but the software engineers deliberately disabled some of those checks to save CPU cycles on a computer that was running at/near capacity. Their reasoning was that it was impossible for the variables in question to overflow given the known flight characteristics... of an Ariane 4.
- atoav 7y agoThis is why I always document considerations like these with stuff like: “This error case can’t happen because foo” or even better, enforce these things by type system and let the compiler decide if it really can’t happen once you changed something in the other part of the code.
- shakna 7y agoAda could have enforced those at the type system level, it has bounded types, but those checks were disabled.