[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: The Airplane Example (was Re: StreamingXML)
On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 16:27 -0800, Daniela Florescu wrote: > I don't > >think I can recall having *ever* had a program fail because someone > >passed a float to a routine that expected an int. > > Really !? > > For an impressive example, just take a look at this: > > http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html > > $7 billion dollars lost in an explosion after only a couple of seconds > in flight. More then 10 years of work for tens of thousands of people. > Fortunately no human loses. > > My lab at that time (INRIA) was tasked to read the millions of lines of code. > There were many problems found, but the cause of the explosion > was an unfortunate type conversion implicit in a function call if I recall > correctly. No. This is an urban legend ("cubicle legend"?), which I've had trotted out before in this argument. I think it's a nice illustration about why people with a strong typing mindset have a compulsion to try to express all problems they see in terms of strong types. The problem was a *units* conversion error, not a type conversion error. No strongly statically typed language that I know of would have prevented it. It's a perfect example of the fact that most real-world bugs are caused by value mismatches, not type mismatches. -- Uche Ogbuji Fourthought, Inc. http://uche.ogbuji.net http://4Suite.org http://fourthought.com Use CSS to display XML - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-xmlcss-i.html Full XML Indexes with Gnosis - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/12/08/py-xml.html Be humble, not imperial (in design) - http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10286 UBL 1.0 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think28.html Use Universal Feed Parser to tame RSS - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipufp.html Default and error handling in XSLT lookup tables - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tiplook.html A survey of XML standards - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-stand4/ The State of Python-XML in 2004 - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/10/13/py-xml.html
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