nificant maintenance has been done on that site for several years. (Note that the newest item on its "what's New" page is a self-congratulatory note about its 1998 traffic.) Better sources now are: http://www.adapower.com/ http://www.adaic.com/ http://www.gnuada.org/alt.html In regard to your question about "27 new features" note that they already had to change the language itself once to eliminate a security hole. They also had to change the JVM to eliminate a hole that could be exploited by using a j-Code assembler rather than a Java compiler. Both of these changes occurred after JDK 1.0 was released. Java deserves credit for getting hundreds of thousands of programmers out of the dark ages of C & C++ into the dim light of common sense. However, Java's so-called designers do not deserve rave reviews for eliminating from C only the worst features, i.e, the features that (in spite of their experience with C) were threatening the schedule of their current (at the time) project. Because of their experience, they had few problems with other undesirable C features, and so they left them in to continue to confound beginners. moreover, if they had done their homework, they may not have omitted as "unsafe" features that Ada and other languages had already shown how to do "safely." Java, in other words, rather than being carefully engineered as an effective general purpose tool, was a hasty hack to rescue a project in trouble. That it was not carefully engineered is shown by some of its numerous changes since first release. Not the ones that were valuable enhancements, but the ones that were mandatory to plug unforeseen holes in Java's over-hyped "security." Java just happened to catch the attention of some clever marketers who recognized that a lot of other projects are in the same kind of trouble. These marketers are not only clever, they are a bit dishonest in promoting the Java language itself as if inseparable from JVM portability (which has already been exploited by compilers and interpreters of Ada, Eiffel, Cobol, Smalltalk, and at least twenty other languages) and Java's admittedly extensive (though sometimes poorly engineered) suite of re-usable APIs (which can be called from any of the languages just hinted at, and via JNI from most other compilers). Again, Java is a welcome improvement over the two previous dominant languages, but I fear most programmers will stagnate in Java (and unportable variations thereof) just as they did for decades in C. -- Wes Groleau http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~wgroleau