Jeff,

> You and several other people have said that a language perceived as
> great for safety critical applications won't even be considered for
> non-safety critical applications.

You are implicating that this is a false assumtion. Unfortunately,
it is, in my experience at least, the reality.

If we forget about safety critical/embedded systems for the moment,
what would be Ada's business case ?

Bottom line first: using Ada _must_ be seen as supporting the business.

Arguments that I used:

Busines objectives: customer satisfaction by reliability, cost reduction
through adaptibility, maintenance reduction and reuse if used properly,
marketing: enhancing corporate image.

(but: Ada alone is not the answer, it just fits very nicely in a evironment
that is engineering friendly)

a) find & fix problems early (even before the customer...)
b) reduce time to market (less debugging, more reuse)
c) reduce maintenance and helpdesk costs (less bugs, easier to repair)
d) business criticality, if flagship product (reliability)
e) market share: adaptibility, portability, faster/cheaper enhancements

f) cultural: expresses company vision and culture (compare compatition)
g) technical: supports all modern engineering notions

Arguments agains are mainly: lack of bindings and libraries and highly
visible success stories. Emotion plays a role too: no warm, fuzzy
'JAVA' feeling... :-)

Needed: senior management sponsors, from sound bottom-line arguments.

Alas, if I knew how to get the business case across in a few lines
in a flyer, I would probably be a marketeer, not an engineer... :-)

Jerry.