Python for air traffic control?

[Gerhard Häring]

On 04 Jul 2001 04:54:21 -0400, Methodical Meowbot wrote:
>18k11tm001 at sneakemail.com (Russ) wrote:
>
>> I am thinking about using Python for a unique safety-critical
>> application in air traffic control.
>
>Software like that would seem to be begging for a language with some
>formal validation behind it, like Ada.

The "validation" behind Ada is sometimes misunderstood. A "validated compiler"
is simply one that passes a certain test suite checking ANSI/ISO standard
compliance, which is IMO a very good thing.

I think that Ada 95 is the best language to use for safety critical systems
such as air traffic control. That's precisely the field Ada was designed for:
large, safety-critical realtime software.

For those interested in proofing software correctness, there is an Ada subset
called SPARK which makes this feasible (with the help of "annotations" that
capture the code designers intention, and additional verification tools). I
found quite interesting what I've read about it on http://www.sparkada.com/ 

Gerhard
-- 
mail:   gerhard <at> bigfoot <dot> de       registered Linux user #64239
web:    http://highqualdev.com              public key at homepage
public key fingerprint: DEC1 1D02 5743 1159 CD20  A4B6 7B22 6575 86AB 43C0
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))