From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: T-Shirts, Neil Young, Asilomar, and Smalltalk Date: Sat, 23 Apr 1994 13:13:00 -0700 (PDT) Thanks for the great message. I hope I don't start (too much of) a flame war about these religious issues... ... I did give a 25-minute talk on "Implications of Cryptography," which generated some good discussion. I also cemented some thoughts in discussion with Bernard Peuto and Ted Kaehler about the need for a deeper analysis of the old computer science work on "mutually suspicious cooperating agents," which was predicted to be a Big Thing for computer science (along with objects, segmented logical address spaces, and several other such Good Ideas), but which faded out when C and flat, Unix-style address spaces came to the fore. You might want to check out research about "the Byzantine Generals problem", e.g. in ACM's TOPLAS, including (I believe) stuff about synchronizing distributed mutually-suspicious clocks. As I understand it, many these problems have been generally solved in theory, and are just waiting for demand and resources to be put in practice. There is room for more work, of course. Objects are Great; C++ (using objects, in I believe the way you mean) is clearly the language of choice for the virtually the entire (commercial) programming industry. At least this is for software; if you are talking about hardware support (e.g. segmented address spaces, such as the i432) this was always dubious, because in general it is always better (when possible and adequately efficient) to do something at "compile time" than "run time" (for example, proving that resources are protected, by ensuring that given protocols are followed). So I think Objects are a Good Idea, but I think Segmented Logical Address Spaces are in principal Less Good (within reason) than a Single Large Address Space (equivalent in size, within reason) with compile-time "proofs" of non-interference. Of course, multiple process address spaces also absorb the functionality provided by Segmented Logical Address Spaces, and so the Client-Server model now being hyped immoderately is sort of an implementation of the Same Thing. ... Food for thought. I'm wondering if a project to implement a kind of "Digital Money World," perhaps in SmalltalkAgents, wouldn't be an interesting project. (Many will probably tell me that a collection of Perl scripts would be more "portable" and more useful to the current Unixcentric community....something I'd like to see more discussion of.) I suspect the framework of choice would be some sort of MOO or MUD. Of course, once it hit production status, then transliteration into Perl install scripts would be appropriate. Exciting times. You bet -- it sure is interesting to be alive in these "latter days". As his ex-Prince-ness has said: "We're gonna party like it's 1999". Of course, we'd better get strong crypto distributed before the Second Coming -- you think the current US government is involved in a power grab, you just wait!!! This new government will really know how to take care of non-conformists -- Waco is nothing compared to what they are planning (read: fiery brimstone)... I wonder if Jesus can create a number so large he can't factor it? --Tim May Pardon my excursion into various religious topics -- arguably this list is also about religion ("religion is what you do" -- "cypherpunks write code" -- belief that strong crypto should be widely distributed is certainly a religious tenet for some on this list). I hope I haven't offended anybody important... Important UnSeminated Encouragement of this DisInformation Alteration is Distributed. -- dat@ebt.com (David Taffs)