Colossus Cipher Challenge Winner On Ada 168
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.'"
Comparison with Allies cypher machine (Score:3, Interesting)
Type Casting (Score:3, Interesting)
ADA Resurgence? (Score:5, Interesting)
Compiler price.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad since Ada is 'by default' a language which is more secure than C++..
hmm. (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean the german fellow was near teh transmitting station and got a very good signal and started right away.
Bletchley Park on the other hand, because of the atmospheric conditions did not get a signal until late in the day and started late. On the other hand the german SW took only 46 seconds.
I'm not saying that the german fellow should not of won, he did fair and square - but there seemed to be no mention in much of the news at the time of the receiver issues.
On the plus side, it was excellent publicity for the park and colossus. If only Churchill had not ordered then scrapped then Britain could of led the technological era.
other factors often dominate language choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Like the author of the article, I have a tendency to dabble with a variety of programming languages. I haven't used Ada seriously, but I am intrigued by it, especially in contrast to the looser languages that are currently popular. A lot of bytes have been spilled on the topic of static and dynamic typing, bondage & discipline vs. unit testing, etc. While these discussions often devolve to religious wars, I do think that language matters. Never mind Sapir-Whorf or Turing, some languages are simply more or less pleasurable or powerful for certain tasks.
That said, often the language itself is not the dominant factor in choosing the language. As nice as (Ada | Erlang | Haskell | Lisp | Ruby) is, it's not going to be my first choice if another language has a readily available library that will make it easier to write the program. I can write web applications in Lisp, but I probably won't. There is probably a parser generator for Ada, but I'd rather use Flex and Bison, or maybe ANTLR. And when it comes to my first choice, independent of problem domain, I'll usually pick Python, in part because of its extensive library.
Re:ADA Resurgence? (Score:3, Interesting)
C++ templates, for example, are just a ripoff of Ada's generics _including_ the Ada angle bracket constraint notation which does not fit at all into C.
Basically it is like the Unix renaissance after Windows tried to offer everything Unix does, except doing it all wrong and contorted and only borderline operative.
Horses for courses (Score:5, Interesting)
Then of course C++ came along which wanted to have its cake and eat it and the end result was a nasty mishmash of low and high level constructs which is difficult to learn , unintuitive and generally messy to use.
HDL (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Type Casting (Score:1, Interesting)
With Ada I found you either understood the problem at hand well enough to express it program logic or not. C invites one to make certain kinds of assumptions which might get your there, but might not always be reliable. But that's just my personal experience.
Churchill didn't order it scrapped... (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Programmer not langauge. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't, so I don't.
For me it is how fast I can produce what the customer/user desires that matters - and more importantly, how fast I can change it - so I use Python - with the option (as yet unneeded) to build C/C++ modules for that language for slow bits. If a bug pops out of my code, I can easily squash it; more difficult with a compiled language.
YMMV