The C language in the planet Mars

[jacob navia]

The Mars lander Phoenix uses the best language for the job.
Here is an excerpt of the interview of O'Reilly with Peter Gluck,
NASA software engineer.

<quote>

That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.

C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.

Yes. It's entirely in C.

I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.

ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has
moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission
that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars
Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a
large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.

After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now.
That's not as scary as everybody thought?

<end quote>

 

[jacob navia]

Sorry, forgot the URL for the last message about the
Phoenix spacecraft:

http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/the-software-behind-the-mars-p.html

 

[Kenny McCormack]

The Mars lander Phoenix uses the best language for the job.
Here is an excerpt of the interview of O'Reilly with Peter Gluck,
NASA software engineer.

<quote>

That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.

C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.

And yet, according to the dolts (I mean, regulars) in this ng, it wasn't
written in C at all.

Since I am sure that there is no mention of "Mars" in the C standards
documents.

Or landers.

Or, ...

 

[John Bode]

The Mars lander Phoenix uses the best language for the job.

<snip>

Why is C the best language for the job? What made it better than any
other language for this particular task? That's not really addressed
in the interview.

He did mention strict coding guidelines, including no dynamic memory
allocation. From what I've seen of safety-critical code written in C,
a good chunk of the language is unused.

 

[Bill Reid]

The Mars lander Phoenix uses the best language for the job.
Here is an excerpt of the interview of O'Reilly with Peter Gluck,
NASA software engineer.

<quote>

That's right. Yeah. The spacecraft software is entirely in C.

C? Really? That surprises me a little bit.

Yes. It's entirely in C.

I thought Lockheed Martin was a big ADA shop for this sort of thing.

ADA is used largely in military applications, but JPL at any rate has
moved away from ADA. Cassini, I believe, would be the last JPL mission
that used ADA. And that was largely due to the success of the Mars
Pathfinder in the mid-nineties. And as I said, these missions are to a
large extent all derived from Mars Pathfinder.

After that successful mission, you say, Hey, we could do it in C now.
That's not as scary as everybody thought?

<end quote>

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave, I just experienced an illegal memory access
and am about to erase all hard driveskdfa#$(&^%KH;ef;@$@^