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A comment on New Weather Service supercomputer faces chaos. Parent comment

Re:New Weather Service supercomputer faces chaos by SolarNet on Saturday January 31, 2015 @10:45PM (#8979093)
I would call an error placed by the compiler due to failure to exactly follow standards a problem in the system.

We are talking totality of systems here, the compiler that produces the programs is part of the system that uses the program.

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Re:New Weather Service supercomputer faces chaos by ithkuil on Sunday February 01, 2015 @03:14AM (#8979480)
I wasn't referring to failures of the compiler to follow the standards, but rather to failures of the _software_ to follow the standard.

"So assuming the two programs running are in fact the exact same,"

The source code for the programs might as well be the same, but the actual (binary) program is not necessarily the same.

Or to put it in other words, both systems might be perfectly correct, but there is a class of software bugs that get revealed only when incarnated after being compiled in one of the several perfectly legit ways. The dimension of this set of possible alternative optimisations can be quite high if your language offers many areas for undefined behaviour.

Does anybody know if fortran is plagued by it as much as C ?

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