Neil Evans <[log in to unmask]> stated that he found the advantages of Ada: the best object oriented language, the most bugs found at compile time, the most secure coding style possible (with minimal or no aliasing when the programmer chooses), great packaging, minimal life-cycle cost of large projects, etc., but he needs to be aware of its weaknesses. These include: - lack of built-in unlimited precision arithmetic (you must program it yourself), - lack of recursive set type (you must program it yourself or use an existing interface to one of the publicly or commercially available data structure packages), - lack of a built-in means of browsing the Internet with a mouse (you must code a line of Ada that links to a commercial product), - contributes to some errors by giving the programmer the ability to stop checking for errors, - does not automatically permit built-in access to call functions in the AUTOCOMM language (although it permits C, assembler, etc., and most compilers permit access to FORTRAN, C++, etc., and some Ada compilers even permit direct access to interpretive languages like Java), - does not automatically take backups of source code or identify the lines of code that have insufficient test coverage (one of the several commercial tools for doing this must be used), - does not automatically make your outputs fit the screen nicely when directing output to the web (you must design your applications manually), - does not automatically accept inputs from voice microphones (you must code a call to a commercial product for this). The high rate of bugs fixed at compile time because of the strong type checking in Ada, the de-aliasing capabilities of limited private types, and other features of the language balance out these bad points and help reduce the cost of lifecycle of large systems coded in Ada that use this locality of reference and dealiasing style, maximizing the number of pure and preelaborable packages. Good luck in your talk. maintenance costs.