Re: Ariane 5: why computers fail

Robert Harley (Robert.Harley@inria.fr)
Tue, 6 Aug 1996 15:36:11 +0200

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I read (most of) the report and basically it was overflow converting a
double to a 16-bit integer. The rest is ass-covering fluff about
Ada-isms and about the hardware not being fault-tolerant. BFD.

It is difficult to express how stunned I am at the incompetence of the
spec-writers and programmers. That is the sort of fault that I don't
expect to see outside of Really-Bad-PC-Games (tm) where precision and
overflow don't matter 'cos it's only graphics, so 16 bits are used
for speed.

The dorks that are responsible ought to be racked, drawn and quartered!

Humph.

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