> Not quite. If you read the details about the case you can find that it didn't have the handler for the overflow in the calculations(!) It's similar to this case now that both were developed with under the assumptions "can't happen," in the sense, developed to be too brittle, for the inputs that were certainly possible to happen as soon as the trajectory (in the case of Ariane 5)
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. The software was intended for the Ariane 4 which wasn't intended to have as much horizontal acceleration as the 5. If the 4 had experienced such an acceleration it wasn't intended to be capable of recovering from it. That area of the code also explicitly had some protections provided by the language removed for the sake of efficiency. So it wasn't a total oversight that just happened to work out - there was a decision made based on the fact the rocket had already irrecoverably failed if the situation ever occurred.
While I agree it's somewhat distasteful not to cover all the bases in the most technically correct way all the time, I'm not sure how important it is to have an overflow handler fire in the inertial reference system just as the rocket self-destructs.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. The software was intended for the Ariane 4 which wasn't intended to have as much horizontal acceleration as the 5. If the 4 had experienced such an acceleration it wasn't intended to be capable of recovering from it. That area of the code also explicitly had some protections provided by the language removed for the sake of efficiency. So it wasn't a total oversight that just happened to work out - there was a decision made based on the fact the rocket had already irrecoverably failed if the situation ever occurred.
While I agree it's somewhat distasteful not to cover all the bases in the most technically correct way all the time, I'm not sure how important it is to have an overflow handler fire in the inertial reference system just as the rocket self-destructs.