Albert van der Horst wrote:
In article <87fwwvrnmf....@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com>,
...
I would even go further.
Types are only part of the story. You may distinguish between integers
and floating points, fine. But what about distinguishing between
floating points representing lengths and floating points representing
volumes? Worse, what about distinguishing and converting floating
points representing lengths expressed in feets and floating points
representing lengths expressed in meters.
When I was at Shell (late eighties) there were people claiming
to have done exactly that, statically, in ADA.
It is cumbersome to do it statically, in the current Ada standard. Doing
it by run-time checks in overloaded operators is easier, but of course
has some run-time overhead. There are proposals to extend Ada a bit to
make a static check of physical units ("dimensions") simpler. See
http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/acs/ac-00184.txt?rev=1.3&raw=Y
and inparticular the part where Edmond Schonberg explains a suggestion
for the GNAT Ada compiler.
A mission failure is a failure of management. The Ariadne crash was.
Just a nit, the launcher is named "Ariane".
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Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
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