>> The cause? A simple, and very much avoidable coding bug, from a piece of dead code, left over from the previous Ariane 4 mission, which started nearly a deca

>> The cause? A simple, and very much avoidable coding bug, from a piece of dead code, left over from the previous Ariane 4 mission, which started nearly a decade before. >> The worst part? The code wasn’t necessary after takeoff, it was only part of the launch pad alignment process. But sometimes a trivial glitch might delay a launch by a few seconds and, in trying to save having to reset the whole system, the original software engineers decided that the sequence of code should run for an extra… 40 seconds after the scheduled liftoff. The author appears to be using a different definition of "dead code" than I'm used to. To me, dead code is code that is no longer called by anything else, and has no chance of running. Maybe a more accurate term is "legacy code"?