From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 95 02:44:11 PST
To: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Subject: Remailer Scripting Languages
In-Reply-To: <ab54891b070210044757@[132.162.201.201]>
Message-ID: <199502071042.CAA27653@netcom9.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> At 6:55 PM 01/31/95, Robert Rothenberg wrote:
> >Without quoting the entire message, I think I better solution, in terms of
> >ease to implement as well as conserving bandwidth would be to have a
> >sophisticated remailer script-language.
> 
> Yeah, this is really an excellent idea, that I don't see happening any time
> soon. Although of course if anyone wants to write code for such a beast,
> that would be really excellent.  If someone gets around to writing it,
> it'll happen, but it would be a fairly big project, so I wouldn't hold my
> break.  Safe TCL, anyone?

I certainly support this kind of idea, and have for a long time.
Crypto is well-suited for the "small languages" point of view (and the
competing points of view for object-oriented systems, production
systems, etc.).

Anything to abstract away the grungy details and hide them. TCL and
Perl are steps, and Strick (Henry Strickland) has of course been
working on his Skronk system, which does some of this.

Python is another possibility.

Some of the graphical-oriented languages like Prograph might be
useful. And I still think Smalltalk has promise, as many financial
institutions are using it to model and automate financial
transactions, which have obvious similarities to our crypto projects. 

The real obstacles are time and money. Corporations and banks doing
this work can put several people on these projects for several years,
while most Cypherpunks projects have to be fit in between "Data
Structures 202" and "Ren and Stimpy."

--Tim May


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