From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 22 May 1998 03:33:34 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: programing (Ada95)
In-Reply-To: <19980522.120339.3414.0.josh434@juno.com>
Message-ID: <E0ycp8O-0008Ra-00@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


josh d smith wrote on 1998-05-22 18:03 UTC:
> i would like to know what programing language everyone prefers
> and any books they recommend on that subject

Depends on what I write:

  C     for efficient quickly developed unsecure hacks

  Perl  for less efficient more quickly developed hacks

  Ada95 for efficient large scale security critical applications,
        especially anything where multi-threading is a big issue

C and Perl are widely known, so I'll only speak about the third one:

Ada95 is actually a very nice language, and I wonder why it is still mostly
used by avionics engineers and the NSA and not so much in the commercial
world. Ada95 is object oriented, has exceptions, multithreading, object
synchronization, generics, decent type concepts, safe arrays and pointers,
etc. There is now a high-quality GNU Ada95 compiler available (GNAT, uses
the same backend and optimizer as gcc). I've put together some beginner's
information about Ada95 on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ada.html

where you find information about books, free compilers and online tutorials.

Java is also a quite nice language. Essentially rather close in functionality
to Ada95, but more targeted towards mobile code applications, while Ada95
is more targeted towards high-performance and embedded security applications
(has better support for low-level programming than Java). Pascal and
Basic are mostly obsolete today (no classes, exceptions, tasks, etc.).

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>