Reading lately so much about retrocomputing made me want to get back to some simple coding, like back in the times where figuring out a 30 line BASIC program was an achievement. So a week ago I downloaded a free `Ada introduction`_ book and started to "work" through it.
.. _`Ada introduction` : https://learn.adacore.com/courses/intro-to-ada/index.html
Yesterday morning I finished with the introduction book and set me a little challenge: Started to implement Playfair_ with only the wikipedia article as a base. Despite having guests for lunch AND dinner, at night at 1AM I had a basic POC together that encrypted the example message correctly.
.. _Playfair : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playfair_cipher
So by now I have a simple Ada package that encrypts / decrypts in Playfair and builds an encryption table given a "secret" keyword.
This is still very much beginner code, the suckage is high.
But I had LOADS of fun and learned a lot. The strong typing system is at times infuriating, and at times bordering on beautiful.
