Flying With Python (Strong versus Weak Typing)

[Peter Hansen]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 
> laotseu fed this fish to the penguins on Tuesday 11 March 2003 06:41 pm:
> > Second thing :
> > Ariane crashed because of a bug in an ADA module. ADA is very strongly
> > *and* statically typed.
> >
>         The module was fine -- for the previous generation of Ariane.
> 
>         If I read correctly, one of the reports available on-line, the closest
> one can come to is that the module which failed was not coded to trap
> an exception condition and recover.

There was a lengthy discussion of this in the Extreme Programming
mailing list at one point.  I can't recall the conclusion, but 
after rereading your quotations it seems to me that this is a 
case where adequate testing could have "easily" identified the problem.

It would be interesting to know what tests where actually done, 
but my guess is that unit tests for the individual routines
involved was not one of them, or that those tests where quite
inadequate (not checking behaviour in the case of an out-of-bounds
value, for example).

-Peter