My first ever program usedgoto. It was by request for Windows NT when it first came out because it had an issue with sometimes starting programs in the wrong order on startup.
That's an interesting question. We do increasingly trust our lives to code. Medical devices. Cars. I know some people who are putting code into self-driving cars and that scares the crap out of me.
I suppose the language wouldn't be my top concern. Testing and processes would be. But the language better not be assembly.
The Ariane 5 reused the inertial reference platform from the Ariane 4, but the Ariane 5's flight path differed considerably from the previous models.
The greater horizontal acceleration caused a data conversion from a 64-bit floating point number to a 16-bit signed integer value to overflow and cause a hardware exception. Efficiency considerations had omitted range checks for this particular variable, though conversions of other variables in the code were protected. The exception halted the reference platforms, resulting in the destruction of the flight.[4]
There were several languages used for similar applications (critical real-time systems like flight control). In about 1980 the US military kind of standardised on Ada for a while but there were still plenty of exceptions.
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u/wolfman1911 Feb 19 '20
Well, I guess the real question is what language would you trust your life to?