From: Peter Murphy <pkm@maths.uq.oz.au>
I was most taken by the idea of a "Crypto Toolkit". I think it would be understand- able to write the code in plain, vanilla C (as opposed to C++). One good reason is the widespread availability of C compilers, especially with UNIX. Additionally, C++ compilers do take up more space (although this would be more of an issue with PCs.
I think Tim had in mind something that was accessible more from a higher- level language than C or C++; ideally, something interpreted so you could sit down and type in a few commands to get something useful. Perl and TCL are two languages which Tim mentioned and which have been discussed here in the past. Smalltalk might do, although it is not as "freely" avail- able. If you want a C toolkit, a good example already exists: the PGPTOOLS package by Pr0duct Cypher. It is available by ftp from csn.org in /pub/mpj to US citizens, and probably from some European crypto sites as well. This has a bignum package as well as interfaces to IDEA and RSA encryption. It also supports processing of PGP message formats and key rings. The latest version has code for Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Hal