I have been at a number of meetings and conferences where people are looking at languages other than Ada to use for avionics applications (my area of interest). Besides Java, there are also "Model-Based" approaches. What does Java have that Ada doesn't? Libraries. What do "Model-Based" approaches have that Ada doesn't? Two things: 1) Graphical approaches for flight control applications. Controls engineers have written their algorithms in diagrams since the 60s. If those diagrams can be automatically made into code, it saves a fair amount of effort. Thus, Simulink, Matlab, etc. 2) Libraries. For guidance, navigation, and other applications that work in floating point (science applications in general), Matlab is an excellent example of an excellent design environment. Why? Because it has a large number of tools available to analyze the data coming out of the program. It is essentially a great code completion editor, compiler, and debugger in one integrated tool. It completes code by adding data declarations (I have never met a GN&C engineer who liked to declare their variables. "They are all double precision floating point anyway; why can't the system create them for me"). It takes the code ("M" files, in a proprietary programming language) and compiles it. And then the debugger allows the code to be executed using all sorts of data analysis routines. What is the result? For flight controls applications, the graphical model can be used to create code in a variety of languages (including Ada). This is reasonable for this application, so there is no need to change anything. For the rest (guidance and navigation), what I see is the engineer creating code using a proprietary language, with either an automatic code generator performing the transformation to the final language or manual translation. Here is my proposal: I am not aware of any sufficient open-source equivalent to the commercial products. If someone (DARPA? NSF?) were to see the need for a more available tool, and fund its development, it could very quickly get into the academic world, and from there into mainstream use. If the language syntax happened to be Ada, I don't think anyone would care. And if the generated language was Ada, the algorithm designers would be better able to look at it at integration time. What do others think? This is obviously a big job, but I think this is already a niche that Ada is used in, and it would be a great shame if we didn't at least fight to keep it. Roger Racine