Okay, I get your drift now.

Though I would have assumed that with the exception of the embedded market place, most low-level physical interface work is done in device drivers. Especially under multi-tasking OSs. As such, in the current environment and increasingly in the future, knowing a general purpose systems language with clean, effective and simple concurrency primitives would be fair more valuable than ADA.

My breif daliance with ADA a few years ago left me shell shocked by its verbocity and pedantic complexities. The nearest analogy I can come up with to describe ADA relative to most other languages, is it is like flying a helicopter compared to flying a plane. So full of interdependant controls that require constant micro adjustments that the effort of flying the thing (constructing syntactically valid programs) is so great, you have little brain power left for thinking about anything else. Be it enjoying the veiw, or obtaining and retaining an overview of the program.