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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.'"
He should have used a real programming language like Java or VB.Net.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
I wonder how easy it would be to break the Allies corresponding machine, the SIGABA (http://www.quadibloc.com/crypto/ro0205.htm). It was stated that during WWII, the Lorenz machine was broken, but the SIGABA wasn't. Of course, given 60 years of computer improvements, it might be possible to break the SIGABA, now.
For those that know the differences in Ada, its a very strongly typed language which makes it harder for a beginning programmer to pickup. It doesn't allow for type conversion and pretty much enforces strict coding rules. It would make sense that he used this since he would have complete control over what his code did exactly. This wouldn't be the case with java or other languages which allow type conversions easily, which is nice for alot of people, but can definitely lead to issues when not accounted for.
Use a masochistic language to break a German code...groovy.
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01010111 01101001 01101101 01110000 00100000 01110101 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01000001 01010011 01000011 01001001 01001001
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Has anyone else started to notice an ADA resurgence? I feel like several years ago the general feeling was "ADA is a backwards language used only on old military projects." Now I read a positive story about ADA every few weeks! Was ADA 2005 that good of a language revision?
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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.
I think that the main reason why Ada has 'lost' to C++ is that some time ago, C++ compiler were either cheap or free whereas Ada compiler were expensive.
Too bad since Ada is 'by default' a language which is more secure than C++..
http://www.schlaupelz.de/SZ42/SZ42_software.html
I often wondered at the time if this was a fair test?
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.
I can't imagine using the words concise and Ada in the same sentence.
Constricted - maybe. Painful - most certainly.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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.
As someone whose first programming language was Ada, and who knows of several universities around the same time who chose Ada as a teaching language, I can say with certainty that you are completely wrong.
First off those strict rules help you because you spend miles less time debugging stuff you don't understand, once it compiles it will tend to run and the compiler gives helpful messages about what you are doing wrong (often including suggestions on how to fix it). With Java, and especially C and C++, let alone scripting languages the beginner spends much more time debugging non-operational code than writing the code in the first place. This tends to mean that these people focus on "getting an executable" rather than "getting it running".
Ada is a brilliant language to teach newbies in (again I've personally done this) as you can explain the abstract concepts and then have the compiler make sure they are doing it right rather than have them say "it compiles but it keeps falling over, why?".
Ada's issues are due to the mentality of lots of (IMO) unprofessional engineers who focus on the number of characters over the operational viability of a system.
And for a final point. Take a look at the complex code the guy wrote, if that was in Java, C, C++, Scala, Ruby, Perl, LISP or what ever do you think that you'd have a chance of understanding it?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Hi,
The GNAT is based on GCC. It's free and it is damn good.
I was also using AONIX and they have a free (as in beer) version. I have always preferred GNAT though.
I am not sure about a website though...
Can't give you advice on the PC, but on the Mac, the default compiler is the GNU compiler suite. That's where the C, C++, and Objective-C compilers come from.
The GNU compiler suite also has an ADA compiler (GNAT, GNU Ada Translator). Should be possible to get it and plug it in without much trouble, and then it'd integrate with everything else. Heck, should be possible to include ADA modules into an Objective-C Cocoa application, even.
There is also a GNU FORTRAN, worth checking out. Even today, you can't do mathematics as efficiently in C as you can in FORTRAN. (This is because of the language; in Fortran, taking the address of an existing variable isn't normal, so variables don't end up with the possibility of "aliases" that they don't know about, which means a lot more stuff can safely be done all in registers and stuff like that.)
There is also a GNU Pascal, but unlike ADA and FORTRAN, I'm not personally aware of any reason to actually use it.
Well it is more complex then that. Different language syntax can help or hinder someones performance for a particular job. For example old C didn't have much to say in terms of string handling if you wanted to use a string you needed to do a Char *VarName then when working with that languge you need to insure memory managment and that you don't create buffer overflows..... A big pain if you didn't make youself some good String functions you spend a lot of your programming just making sure your program doesn't blow up. vs. Newer Languges And the String class in C++ where you can concatinate get sub strings parse.... it makes doing such job much easier and a lot less anoying. Most well programed languges will not prevent you from getting anything done. However there is the Human element of the equasion if the syntax is to difficult for a particular job then the person will tire out and make more mistakes. The winner of this competition felt that ADA syntax offered him the ability to solve the problem better, thus helped him to win.
I have written Web Apps in FORTRAN 77 just to prove that you can. However I wouldn't say it would be OK to consult a client to do the same, as it really isn't the right tool for the job.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Its not really surprising that he found ADA nicer to use than C for this sort of project because its not the sort of thing C was created for. People seem to think that C was designed as an all purpose programming language - it wasn't. It was specifically designed as a systems programming language that could substitute for assembler 99% of the time. Its abilities lie in low level manupulation of memory and I/O , not in high level mathematics algorithms (though obviously it can do this too).
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.
I've used both verilog (C based) and VHDL (ADA based) and the latter wins hands down for being maintainable and easy to debug. Nobody had to write a LINT checker for VHDL like they did for verilog. I totally believe this guy.
He (and his successor, Attlee) kept it classified. Then, during decolonization, they gave lots of captured Enigma machines to former colonies to allow them to keep their communications secure -- and allow the former colonial power to keep an eye on things :)
I can't help wondering how many of the people making snide comments about Ada (note: not ADA; it's not an acronym) have actually used it.
If I could type 90 wpm and never make a mistake, I'd be using Ada or Fortran today.
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
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
He obviously settled on Ada, because Ada allowed him to implement.
But in order to fall back to the post, firstly as noted, there are bit fields in C, and you can use them to represent sequences of bits in 90% of the cases where you need to.
Ada has an equivilant with packed types. You can set the 'Size attribute on custom types with bit precision, and you can pack multiple custom types into a record just like bitfields. We use this to read in packed data from hardware all the time.
The only major failing I found was using these for stream IO (file in/out): unless you redefine the stream attributes for the type, Ada will automatically assume that the minimum size of the type is 8 bits, and will resize fields smaller than this. Makes for a lot of fun when trying to figure out why your file format is wrong, or you read in incorrect data.
C has bitwise operators that actually works (compared to Ada), which makes it a lot more suitable for bitmanipulation than Ada.
Oh, hell yes. Bitwise operations in Ada are so clumsy they made me tear my hair out.
C also treat arrays and pointers as the same, and pointers are not checked, and you can cast data and pointers to whatever you want, this is why it is suitable for low level memory manipulation.
I don't consider treating arrays and pointers the same to be a huge benefit; it's more of a kludge. Anyway, you can get the same performance as C pointers by using Ada access types; just make sure your types are aliased.
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"Ada has an equivilant with packed types. You can set the 'Size attribute on custom types with bit precision, and you can pack multiple custom types into a record just like bitfields. We use this to read in packed data from hardware all the time."
Yes, this is true, and it is one of the areas where Ada is very nice, i.e. for doing packet decoding (though in my opinion, erlang is nicer in this aspect).
The bad thing is that the syntax for declaring your packed records in Ada is a bit redundant.
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