> I've just come out of a lecture wherein we were told that Java took the
> good bits from C++ and Smalltalk and Ada.  Someone else at the same

The lecturer (to be charitable) is misinformed.  The only thing Java added
to C++ was a little bit of (not nearly enough) error-resistance.  The good
features of Ada 95 that Java has is a very short list.  The good features
of Ada 83 that Java has is a very long list.  I'm not qualified to discuss
Smalltalk.

> university told me a few months ago that Ada's OO support is inferior but

Inferior to what?  Java's OO support has a few things Ada doesn't.
Ada's OO support has a lot of things Java doesn't--and most of these
were in Ada 83!

> I suspect that he wasn't aware that Ada 83 is object based whereas Ada 95
> is object oriented (and he mentioned the implementation of rendezvous in
> Ada as insufficient).

Insufficient for what?  And does he propose an alternative?  Perhaps he
means that Ada 95 added protected types because the rendezvous of Ada 83
was not enough.  There is NO popular language that has as much built-in
concurrency support as Ada 83, much less Ada 95.  Or perhaps he is
displeased that Ada provided the rendezvous as a single boring language
feature instead of a collection of low-level library calls that give the
programmer the chance to prove how clever he is.  (Which more often
results in the programmer proving he can forget details just as well as
any other human.)

--
Wes Groleau
http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau