[mercury-users] cryptography / RC4

[Ralph Becket]

Michael Day, Tuesday, 12 February 2002:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Has anyone implemented any cryptography algorithms in Mercury, such as RC4
> for example?

Michael Roe at Microsoft Research in Cambridge has implemented
some standard crypto algorithms in Mercury.  He used the "reversibility"
made possible thanks to Mercury's mode system to describe the crypto
relation once and get both encryption and decryption procedures
depending upon which mode ((in, out) vs (out, in)) was used.  This is
rather nice, since it halves the opportunity of introducing bugs in the
implementation.  On a related note, I know people at Cambridge Uni. have
also toyed with the idea of using Mercury as a hardware description
language whereby the same piece of code could be used to generate, say,
both a multiplexer and a demultiplexer.  There's an interesting PhD in
there somewhere if anybody's tempted... :)

- Ralph
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