From: Bob Leif To: Tom Moran et al. After having suffered through innumerable traumas with today's commercial software, I can assure you that the customers would purchase reliable software. Unfortunately, no one has attempted to sell reliable software. Software engineers can be motivated to create it in Ada because Ada has two great advantages. 1) Separate specifications that are compiled facilitate distributed development. Monster software factories like Microsoft can be replaced by virtual corporations (no commute to work). And 2) With ASIS, we can have both the benefits of open source and a royalty driven entrepreneurial) marketplace. As for Windows, it will soon collapse of its own weight. I still see Windows 98 prominently displayed in the stores. It should have been supplanted by Windows 98. Anyone have any relative sales figures? It is now time to for Ada to switch to the next software epoch, XML. Tom, you are the one, who actually demonstrated that this can be done. XML employs a formal actual notation. I admit putting the actuals in quotes is strange to me. XML also has the equivalent of range checking and begins and ends. For those interested, please see, St. Laurent and Biggar, "Inside XML DTDs McGraw Hill, part of ISBN 0-07-134621-X. -----Original Message----- From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Tom Moran Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2000 12:02 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: What the competition looks like (resurrected) >failure of standardization at software level, the standardization happened >at hardware level - the PC. > >The exact same process is happening again. There is a need for >cross-platforms applications, and since languages are still unable to be >really portable, we see the standardization happening a (virtual) hardware >level: the JVM. Cross-platform applications are a tiny niche indeed. Wintel is nearly the whole game, economically speaking. I understand even Stephen King's internet story came out only on Windows. If standardization was a problem, languages could handle it - but OS/API libraries are the locus of the big differences. Java is useful for downloaded programs because programs in any other language are too big and too likely to harbor destructive viruses. BTW, if you wanted to record long TV shows, like football games, early VHS was technically superior to Beta. Ada is technically superior to C for reliable software, which few want, and perhaps for embedded software, for which there are few Ada 95 compilers. It may in fact be superior for quick and dirty Windows software too, but few know that and fewer will take the time to learn. <end rant>