I've been silently following these recent threads and am going to provide my opinions ONCE before departing from this list. (I have made several unsuccessful attempts to unsubscribe and am hoping that I will be kicked out for publicly flaming Mr. Spanning) Richard Conn is correct in his view that Ada needs more public backing to survive. The problem is that the general public follows software TRENDS, and the Ada community tends to frown on trends because they lack quality software engineering practices. i.e. Legions of mostly clueless VB "programmers" and PERL scripters. It's been proven countless times that Microsoft is a software "groupie", and does very little to promote sound software engineering practices. I'm not going to argue this point any further. However, software trends exist outside of the M$ domain. I'm talking about Linux. In order to survive I think that Ada needs to piggyback on Linux trends. There has always been a strong synergy between Ada and Linux and the Ada community needs to capitalize on this in a big way. Recently Linux has made major headway as an alternative OS to M$ crap. It is very stable, has a large and generous pool of talent contributing to it, and is making inroads into the embedded domain (a domain that Ada excels in). These pocket PCs and other portable computing devices are going to become very pervasive in the years to come. However, the lines between old-school embedded systems and modern computers are becoming very blurred. Sure there will always be a small market for ultra simple embedded systems in aerospace, defense, etc, but small TRENDY CONSUMER devices will humble the most advanced desktop system today in terms of raw computing power. And to provide the consumer with all that flashy whiz-bang functionality a full fledged graphical OS will be required. This is where a Linux/Ada solution can be a big hit! Ada needs corporate backing from some of the "embedded" Linux companies. Why not rewrite the Linux kernel in Ada? There is an initiative afoot to write a complete OS in Ada. Why not steer it towards Linux compatibility so it can run the VAST amount of GPL'd Linux applications out there? Hell, why not approach Transmeta with a Linux/Ada based OS for pocket PCs? An area where Linux is extremely lacking is a decent graphics subsystem. Xwindows is dead. Hey if somebody wrote an alternative in Ada I would gladly use and support it, and I'm sure many other talented software engineers would too. This is another idea for a "killer Ada application". Anyways, I'm starting to ramble, so that's my $0.02. Embrace change, embrace it with Ada, go forth and conquer. Andrew Logue Computing Devices Canada [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]