Adaphiles, This anger at the NRC report seems misguided. The problem really is not what a branch of the Federal Government decides to do or how it goes about doing it, but rather how do we popularize Ada. The Adaphobes will twist and turn any Government study, pro or con, to their advantage. If the report is pro-Ada, they will rely on anti-government sentiment to proclaim a whitewash. An anti-Ada report draws the 'I told you so' response. Either way, Ada looses. The real battle lies in proving Ada's worth, not in the DoD backwaters but in the commercial marketplace. Remember, C's dominate position is only a recent occurence and is primarily due to the success of Unix (where would C be with out Unix?) and the 'workstation' concept. The advent of the IBM PC reinforced C's position simply because it was easy to write a C compiler that ran in the limited memory and disk available on those machines. Does anyone remember that the MacOS was written in Pascal? And that Microsoft based Windows upon MacOS and wrote Windows in Pascal? (Look at all those '_pascal' interface modifiers in the Windows headers.) Microsoft's switch to C happened in the 1985 time frame. When the two most popular platforms, Unix and Windows, went to C, were was the commercial world going to go? To quote a former British Prime Minister "There is no alternative". The commercial world is not to happy with C. Look at the success of VisualBasic, Delphi, or any of the database 4GL's such as Progress. What the commercial world needs a compelling case to use Ada, and no government report is going to supply that case. Sometime ago, on this mailing list, Paul Pukite made a case for a 'killer application' written in and based upon Ada, something along the lines of Borland's Delphi. Give people a reason to look at Ada. One 'killer application' is a far more effective argument than thousands of pages of reasoned thought. Would it not be more fruitful to apply our minds to finding and building such applications, than to be expending so much energy on a talking-shop paper? Dave Koogler Boolean Solutions, Ltd. P.S. I am an example of the kind of person Ada needs to attract. As a consulting engineer I have seen scores of applications writen in dozens of languages and semi-languages. My earning come from fixing broken systems predominately written in C/C++. I wanted a language I could depend upon for writing my own applications. Even after working in C for a decade, the language was never satisfying. I worked very hard at understanding C++, but after five years I realized C++ is a black hole because no two compilers accepted the same language and implemented the same semantics (this realization came after a contract where I was responsible for testing a C++ optimizer for a large computer system's vendor). My search for a replacement lead me to Gnat and Ada 95. I rejected Ada95 because it appeared too complex (I printed out the annotated language reference manual when I should have gone for the unannoted manual!) I briefly looked at Modula-3 but gave up since I could not get a language reference and I found it full of inconsistencies. Lucky for me that I took another look Gnat. Ada95 had everything I wanted in a systems implementation language. For the last two years, Ada has been my language of choice, and it won on its technical merits. The point is that Ada can win. The 'killer application' for me was the Gnat compiler--It ran on all the platforms I need and its price was right. Without Gnat, I would never have even looked. People are lead by emotions. Show them something that excites them and you have made the sale. Given the right application, Ada can win over many more just like me.