Other Directory Sites: SeekWonder | Directory Owners Forum
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:04
mgraffam@idsi.net
Mon, 18 Jan 1999 10:11:47 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, James Maitland wrote:
> One solution to this is to abstract the crypto so far away from the program
> that the latter isn't even aware the crypto is there.
Yeah, this goes along with 'general processing module' too .. or even
scripts that can pre/post process the data.
That is, allow support for a plug-in module to work on some 'data.' This
module could do all sorts of useful things. One module could convert MS
Word files into the program's internal format, another could decrypt PGP
encrypted documents. Other modules could do compression/decompression.
A general suite like that would be rather powerful. One suite of programs,
say a general office suite, with plug in ability for all sorts of things,
notably crypto. One may be better off here using a good scripting language
(Perl comes to mind) than compiled modules. In which case our whole thing
starts looking a little like Emacs.. which is a good thing, IMHO.
Aahh.. too bad Emacs doesn't use Perl.
I find it hard to believe that a word processor would not exportable
merely because it could be made to open zip's or convert documents from
some other WP.
Then again, were I not in the middle of all this, I'd find it hard to
believe that crypto is restricted to begin with.
Michael J. Graffam (mgraffam@idsi.net)
"If you die, you win.."
John Landry, statistics professor discussing life insurance
and probability
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:18:04