[Melbourne-pm] Perl crypto code

[Michael Bombardieri]

Hi everyone,

I'm posting this email here because there isn't a perth-pm list that I
know of. I'm a computer science student in Perth, but I used to live in
Melbourne (Preston).

I've been playing with cryptography in my spare time and a bit of my
work is now on Wiretapped.net at
<http://www.mirrors.wiretapped.net/pub/security/cryptography/algorithms/mb/>.

I have 2 questions to ask here:

1. What is the general consensus on the state of Perl6? I read that it
supports / will support strict data types kind of like C, which sounds
like a great idea. Also, that it will have its own preprocessor. I
haven't tried out Parrot/Pugs, so forgive me if this is a dumb question.
Are there people actually using Perl6 at the moment or is it still too
infantile to do anything useful?

2. How difficult is it to build Perl modules? I've been thinking about
integrating some crypto code into Perl via a Crypt::bla module. I know
that some CPAN modules are written in Perl and some in C. Are there any
good tutorials for writing modules?

Thanks for your time.


Michael Bombardieri