Re: Industry versus academia

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

>   You gave the example of creating provably correct software for air 
>   traffic control. I'm wondering, how large a part of the endeavour is 
>   taken by coding? Where are errors most likely? In the implementation? 
>   Or rather in the specification? If it's the latter, no programming 
>   language is going to help.
BTW.. as someone who works with the aviation industry, I find
these postings about proving correctness there mildly amusing. This is
sort of orthogonal to the discussion, but the problems wrt. such
software are not w/ their construction so much as their ongoing
maintenance in the field.

There are several essays like the foll. that can be googled.
http://www.geocities.com/bigmike_75/essays/w/23.html

The problem is still open. I think the FAA ATC project often makes
number one or number two in largest software failures of all time :)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/013673443X/104-8616223-7373525?vi=glance

Do you really believe that a provably correct programming language
could have helped in these cases?