> This is a re-posting on behalf of someone else.  It is being sent this way to
> protect the reputation
> of the company involved.

Can you let your contact know that I would be happy to travel
and meet with any major company that is debating the merits
of using Ada vs. XX for some important software development project?

As a point of information, Rational Rose supports Ada code
generation, and always has.  Also, as I am sure you are aware,
it is no more difficult to call a C function from Ada than
it is from C++.  They both require a declaration that the function
is written in a "foreign" language.

The presence of C++ does nothing to alleviate "government"
concerns about the safety of C.  If anything, C++ is less
safe than C, because of the increased number of ways you
can mysteriously shoot yourself in the foot, such as leaving
off a "&" when declaring a parameter, creating a copy constructor
which mysteriously gets called as an implicit conversion operator
at miscellaneous places in the code, downcasting to the wrong
type, etc.  C++ admittedly has more features which can be
used to create "safe" abstractions, but the defaults in C++
(e.g. casting, creating references, array indexing, pointer
dereferencing, etc.) are all unsafe, just as they are in C.
In Ada, the defaults are all safe, and you have to make explicit,
obvious "noise" to do unsafe programming, making verification
and integration of large systems significantly cheaper and faster.

In any case, as said above, I am quite willing to participate more
directly with companies debating language choice issues, and will
travel as necessary.

-Tuck