Ada: curse, or cure all?

The author addresses some of the concerns about the capabilities of Ada and provides suggestions for entering into Ada developments which lower the perceived risks. He argues that the problems with Ada have been overstated, and he notes that it has been used successfully on many projects and with great success. Experience on ten projects over six years and several hundred thousand lines of code indicates that Ada is very capable of handling applications in the hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It has some shortcomings in its ability to support real-time applications, but these shortcomings have been identified and worked around without endangering the success of the project. It is concluded that Ada may not be the cure-all which many promised, but is a significant step toward standardization within the software-development community