[SystemSafety] New paper on MISRA C

[clayton at veriloud.com]

Derek,
I know your were an early contributor so I won’t debate you too much on the history ;-) but...

> On Sep 3, 2018, at 8:42 AM, Derek M Jones <derek at knosof.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Your first sentence is a common misconception.
> "The MISRA project started in 1990 with the mission of providing world-leading best practice guidelines for the safe and secure application of both embedded control systems and standalone software.”
> 

I think more a generalization rather than misconception.

> What actually happened was that MISRA were paid to write a guideline
> document, it appeared at the right time and place, and was sufficiently
> vague that it tool companies could claim to support it (whatever their
> tool did). 

If we’re talking about the origination of the standard, not the organization, I’m told it began as a BT coding standard in 1994 and initially concerned with the portability (or lack thereof) aspects of C.  In 1997, its author, working a consultant for Programming Research, was sent a draft guideline by an auto manufacturer for review.  The guideline was deemed “somewhat behind the leading edge” and the BT standard was sent back as an alternative. Four months later that alternative was sent back for review, re-titled "MISRA C Version 0.1. MISRA C 1998”. Programming Research then customized their tool to the rules and found it could "flag over 85% of statically detectable deviations.” The rest is history, but yeah an over-generalization as well. My source for this is the original author of the BT rules, Owen Morgan (then known as David Blyth). 


 
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