In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > If you have enough hardware grunt, you could think > about having three independent processes working in > parallel. They vote on their output, and best out of > three gets reported back to the user. In other words, > only if all three results are different does the device > throw its hands up in the air and say "I don't know!"
Ok, I will give you a bit more information, so that the situation is a bit clearer. (Sorry, I cannot tell you the exact application.) The system is a safety system which supervises several independent measurements (two or more). The measurements are carried out by independent measurement instruments which have their independent power supplies, etc. The application communicates with the independent measurement instruments thrgough the network. Each instrument is queried its measurement results and status information regularly. If the results given by different instruments differ more than a given amount, then an alarm is set (relay contacts opened). Naturally, in case of equipment malfunction, the alarm is set. This covers a wide range of problems from errors reported by the instrument to physical failures or program bugs. The system has several weak spots. However, the basic principle is simple: if anything goes wrong, start yelling. A false alarm is costly, but not giving the alarm when required is downright impossible. I am not building a redundant system with independent instruments voting. At this point I am trying to minimize the false alarms. This is why I want to know if Python is reliable enough to be used in this application. By the postings I have seen in this thread it seems that the answer is positive. At least if I do not try apply any adventorous programming techniques. - Ville -- Ville Voipio, Dr.Tech., M.Sc. (EE) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list