if you're doing that sort of thing you should have several layers of review and testing (except for unit tests, the language choice shouldn't make a difference to testing).

you can do pointers in Ada, too.

with Ada no longer being required by various agencies, expect the pool of Ada programmers to shrink.

except for gnat (which is mostly free), license fees for the Ada development environments i used before were $20K-$30K a seat. recently i tried to install gnat on a redhat 7.3 system and gave up after awhile, downloading package after package that was missing or out-of-date on my machine (over dialup) and finally giving up. (i have a dvd with fedora now but need time to backup first.)

james