Re:How do you compute the midpoint of an interval? (2014) [pdf]
by lhjuhafjbh on Friday March 29, 2019 @06:02AM
(#19520315)
A microcontroller for a pump probably doesn't need floating point numbers, but flight control software uses it.
This went wrong before and an Ariane 5 was blown up (automatically as a safety measure), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)#Launch_fa...
Strictly speaking the problem was converting floats to 16-bit integers which ended in an overflow... So avoiding floats doesn't even help as it won't protect you from overflows.
This went wrong before and an Ariane 5 was blown up (automatically as a safety measure), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)#Launch_fa... Strictly speaking the problem was converting floats to 16-bit integers which ended in an overflow... So avoiding floats doesn't even help as it won't protect you from overflows.