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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.
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