Mr. Brashear said(speaking of Microsoft): "They're interested in "what their customers want" rather than conformance to standards. I guess that's what you get when you have a monopoly.)" If most government institutions(or stubborn individuals) strongly wanted Ada and Open Source, they could convince Microsoft to integrate/support a Visual Ada in Visual Studio via tax incentives or other military/non-military non-violent actions :) -- Santé bonheur! David Marceau Analyst/Programmer - Firepower Systems Land Software Engineering Centre - DND Canada [log in to unmask] 613.995.1126 http://homestead.deja.com/user.davidmarceau4432/files/DavidMarceau.html -----Original Message----- From: Brashear, Phil [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, December 02, 1999 6:54 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: What the competition looks like David Marceau said (speaking of Microsoft): One big problem...they're not into open source. Another big problem with Microsoft and Ada -- they're not into standardization. You can pretty much guarantee that a Microsoft Ada would have additional features not permitted by the standard and would ignore features that are required by the standard. See Visual C++ for numerous examples. (I've talked with some Microsoft personnel about validation of their C/C++ and Fortran products. They're interested in "what their customers want" rather than conformance to standards. I guess that's what you get when you have a monopoly.) Phil Philip W. Brashear EDS Conformance Testing Center 4646 Needmore Road, Bin 46 P.O. Box 24593 Dayton, OH 45424-0593 (937) 237-4510 [log in to unmask] http://www.eds-conform.com