On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 10:42 PM, Roy Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > In article <[email protected]>, > David Robinow <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Tim Roberts <[email protected]> wrote: >> > More than "not required", it was "not relevant". This led to one of the >> > most infamous programming blunders in the early days of the space program, >> > when one programmer accidentially typed a period instead of a comma >> > resulting in the loss of a satellite: >> Interesting story. Did you make it up? > > It's a fairly well known story. > > http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.64.html#subj4.2 Sure. But the question is, "Who made it up?" http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fortran
Computer folklore has incorrectly attributed the loss of the Mariner 1 space probe to a syntax error in a Fortran program. For example, "Recall the first American space probe to Venus, reportedly lost because Fortran cannot recognize a missing comma in a DO statement…"[ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
