From: Bob Leif To: John McCabe et al. "we need to expand and pointing out places where Ada is used in a 'trivial' way is always going to help." Since I make my living primarily in the development of Analytical Cytology chemistries and instruments, I am exposed to and depend upon a large number of commercial software products. A specific case in point is my recent upgrade to Adobe Photoshop 6.0. I use Photoshop to display and manipulate the 12 bit images that I produce with a very low noise camera. Adobe claims that Photoshop is has been upgraded from 8 to 16 bits per pixel for monochrome images; unfortunately, most of its methods do not take 16 bit images as arguments. The obvious reason for this and many other examples of similar lack of functionality in upgrades of commercial products is that their software designs were suboptimal. These design flaws were often the result of the choice of programming language. The gray scale maximum value and, of course, the number of pixels in a rectangular image (X_Max and Y_Max) should have been based on generic . Since C++ templates have only recently come into use, I doubt that Adobe made use of this functionality. Can anyone comment on the capacity of C++ templates and classes to build first monochrome images and then reuse the monochrome code for N dimensional color images. I suspect that an Ada generic with a two dimensional array of pixels, which could be a tagged type, would be a much better place to start. The reason for my interest is that Analytical Cytology images can have measurements of 8 or even more molecular species and the spectra are not limited to visible light. I might note that this type of technology will eventually be used for automated Pap tests and other cytology and pathology diagnostic procedures. Returning to the beginning, it should be noted software upgrades are the ultimate maintenance business. They can be very profitable; in that, upgrades are often sold directly to the end-user. The ease of maintenance of Ada should both lower the costs of upgrades and increase their frequency. In short, Ada has much to offer to the developers of commercial software. -----Original Message----- From: Team Ada: Ada Advocacy Issues (83 & 95) [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of [log in to unmask] Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 1:29 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Times Square Studios building >Hey, Mike's previous repeated, documented citation about Ada being used to >upgrade the NYC subway system ought to carry more weight. (Go to his >SIGAda Education WG webpage for links.) And that it's based on very >effective and cost-effective "reuse" from Paris, Cairo, etc. subway systems >in Ada. Those applications are much more in a domain with requirements for >which we should be extolling Ada, and ought to impress your boss much more >than a neon sign. -hh I still don't agree with this attitude. I don't think we should be so blinkered about Ada's capabilities. Sure it is the perfect language for safety critical work, but this is already well known. Of course we need to try to maintain that market, but we need to expand and pointing out places where Ada is used in a 'trivial' way is always going to help. John