Jeff Burns (GrammaTech) wrote:
>As a marketeer, I think that "Safety Critical" is Ada's strongest possible
>position in the market and this should be stated explicitly in the tag line.
>
>Safety critical is a compelling and justifiable position relative to other
>languages that Ada is uniquely qualified to fill.
>...

Realize that at least the following 4 attributes are being hailed as
"unique" qualifications of Ada (and there could be others with strong
claims to uniqueness, including "large,", "complex," & "software
engineered," although these are pretty much orthogonal to the list of 4):
 - safety critical
 - reliable
 - real-time
 - distributed

I think our Ada-promotion strategy should recognize and advocate Ada's
strengths when any of these are important.

As Jeff points out, the first two correlate well, but the other attributes
are relatively independent, standing on their own as Ada advantages even if
the others don't matter to a particular application.

As a note, the SIGAda'99 conference theme (Tucker Taft & Franco Gasperoni,
PC Co-Chairs) is going with "real-time" and "distributed" to sharpen
(narrow) the focus in the conference to areas perceived to be Ada's unique
strengths, an intention shift from previous all-comers themes.  (And Ada
Europe's conference theme  is always about "reliable software
technologies," naturally bringing in "safety critical.")

   --hh