Well, I suppose it is time for me to add my two-cents. I like most of what I see in the ideas for the ARA flyer. The emphasis on safety-critical is a good place to start. I also agree that we need some way to reach the rest of the software development community. Most important is that someone is doing something. Several team members lamented that this should have been done when Ada 95 first appeared. Better late than never. Some, thankfully not all, of our clients are abandoning Ada for non-technical reasons. I sit in a meeting with some software development managers and hear them say, "Ada probably is a better language than xxxx, but it does not seem to have any future. We cannot easily find programmers, we are concerned about long-term support, and we don't see good tools for development and debugging." One client representative assured me that they would be using Ada for a long time just as they still have projects coded in Jovial. But they would start all new development, safety-critical software development, in C++ because they had a greater guarantee of long-term support and available personnel. Why am I saying this? Everyone has heard it before. The "Choose Ada" flyer is an important first step. It will require a lot of follow-up. This means that we cannot simply issue a flyer and be done with it. We need a concerted effort, a well-planned publicity campaign, that includes press releases, short articles in key publications, continued support of Ads such as those that Aonix has been placing, a speaker's bureau with slide shows that anyone in the speaker's bureau can use, more representation at non-Ada software developer shows and conferences, support for the excellent work of Richard Conn and his colleagues in providing downloadable Ada resources, and on and on. When David started Team-Ada, he had such a vision. This ListServ was intended as a seedbed from which we could transplant ideas into the software community at large. I am happy to see so much interest in the "Choose Ada" flyer. Let's see whether, once we plant that within the software community, we can cultivate it, provide continued nourishment for it, find ways to help it grow. To carry the analogy to an extreme, there is a lot of fertile soil for good ideas about software development. Much of that soil is made more fertile by the rotting compost of C and C++ code. It is that fertile soil that helped Java to sprout. Let's make sure that "Choose Ada" is not like a bag of seed that never gets planted. Richard Richard Riehle [log in to unmask] AdaWorks Software Engineering Suite 30 2555 Park Boulevard Palo Alto, CA 94306 (650) 328-1815 FAX 328-1112 http://www.adaworks.com