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/>