On Tuesday 08 June 2010, Hans van Thiel wrote:
Now, what Gerard Holzmann told me in the interview, is that NASA is very conservative in it's use of software tools. They don't use C++, just C, and a well defined version of the GNU C compiler at that. The coding standards, which even prohibit the use of C pointers, are aimed to keep everything as simple as possible. Just imagine hundreds of people working over many years to produce code where any error, how trivial it may be, will occur millions of miles away, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and could damage the reputation of the company and its future funding.
Perhaps it's just my lack of imagination that was driving my original question. I'm just having a hard time imagining how to write reasonably interesting algorithms that way. As I wrote, they might "cheat". It's entirely possible to implement dynamic memory on top of fixed-size arrays and use indexes instead of pointers. Of course, I have no idea if that's what they do. Michael -- Michael Schuerig mailto:michael@schuerig.de http://www.schuerig.de/michael/