Colossus Cipher Challenge Winner On Ada

An anonymous reader writes "Colossus Cipher Challenge winner Joachim Schueth talks about why he settled on Ada as his language of choice to unravel a code transmitted from the Heinz Nixdorf Museum in Germany, from a Lorenz SZ42 Cipher machine (used by the German High Command to relay secret messages during the World War II). 'Ada allowed me to concisely express the algorithms I wanted to implement.'"

Let the raging tardfight commence

[Malevolent Tester]

He should have used a real programming language like Java or VB.Net.

Re:Let the raging tardfight commence

[morgan_greywolf]

He should have used a real programming language like Java or VB.Net.

Pffft. Real men write programs like this:

$ cat >/bin/myprogram

I like the choice.

[DrWho520]

Use a masochistic language to break a German code...groovy.

Wimp using ASCII

[jellomizer]

01010111 01101001 01101101 01110000 00100000 01110101 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01000001 01010011 01000011 01001001 01001001

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:ADA Resurgence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was ADA 2005 that good of a language revision?

If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig.

Re:I had to learn ADA in college

[kellyb9]

Actually most colleges don't want to be typecasted a "C++ school" or an "ADA school". It's more important to learn data structures and theory. If you went to a good school, the language something is written is trivial, learning the syntax should not be that difficult.

Re:Let the raging tardfight commence

[valentingalea]

He should have used Brainfuck [wikipedia.org]!

Re:I had to learn ADA in college

[Shinmizu]

Brian

As a cat once told me, "Anonymous Coward, ur doin it wrong."

Re:ADA Resurgence?

[Skeptical1]

Ada is not a backward language. Ada is a palindrome.

Re:Concise??!!

[hey!]

I can't imagine using the words concise and Ada in the same sentence.

Perhaps you should read what you just wrote.

Re:Let the raging tardfight commence

[Anonymous Coward]

You misspelled "emacs."

Re:Let the raging tardfight commence

[Hasmanean]

Real men don't use constants. They express all quantities in their natural units, (such as the size of the known universe, or the diameter of a hydrogen atom). Needless to say, they do not require constants to convert the answers to meter-kilogram-second units.

In fact better men than these do not even use equations. They let the laws of physics fall out of their simulations, as evanescent perennial relationships between variables.