"James Newton, Host" wrote:

> > All have been done in various compilers that we have done but
> > there has been little customer interest
> >
> > w..
>
> It sounds like user education is the missing factor. If you have any text
> that points out why these issues are important, I would love to start a web
> page on piclist.com regarding this subject.

On June 4, 1996 an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off from Kourou, French Guiana.  A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It
turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. Specifically a 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed
integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.

http://www.ima.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html

w..


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