I've been programming in Perl nearly half my life. I don't see any reason I won't be into the future. It's always been a handy companion. Some of the code I've written I've kept handy for years.
I'm also a big believer in the freedom of the people, and in the right to benefit from ingenuity. Some of the major events that have happened during my lifetime that people here understand much better than the public at large are the development of digital encryption and the battles such as Ron Rivest and Phil Zimmerman had to go through unnecessarily. They've given us the world we know today and helped enable the careers many of us enjoy.
A few years back I answered a challenge for showing short crypto implementations in encryption golf (one time pad). Although ikegami bested me I've always considered that one of my favorite nodes and threads here. Well, my new implementation is shorter than my old one. It's not shorter than ikegami's but I decided that I was interested in not using command-line flags and in aesthetics.
I know ITAR has been relaxed and all and one-time pad isn't exactly a full public key system. It can be a darn good, mathematically infallible shared key portion of a hybrid scheme though. If I lose the media, I've got much bigger problems. It's part statement, part fun, part tribute to the crypto folks, and part tribute to Perl.
$/--;print<>^<>
That's three characters less than before, and I think it looks pretty good. I especially like it in Liberation Mono typeface. I mentioned before it was a tattoo-worthy size. I think from now on I can always think of this code as part of me.
