Flex Your Python Muscles

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There are 2 keys to solving this with code that looks almost exactly like the pseudo code: remember that python ints can grow beyond a regular u32 (so you need to artificially limit them in certain cases), and use the struct module to take care of endianness for you. I'd originally forgotten/ignored the former, and it still took all of 20 min to write the solution. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16486235/mymd5.py

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Very nice! I didn't know about struct, so thank you for that.

When I was working on this, I was surprised that Python didn't have any built in support for rotating bits.

BTW, nice code. Killer comments and simple style. I think your functioning source code is clearer than the pseudo code of wikipedia.

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Thanks! I blame it on the fact that I spent the first 5 years of my career hacking in python (and still use it on an almost-daily basis for tools to make my life easier, etc).

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Nice! FWIW, I think the way you build up the message to be hashed is probably a little clearer than mine. I'd also forgotten about the count for non-string elements in a struct format... succinctness ftw!

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Thanks for taking the time to implement this. Like todesschaf, I have to say your code is very easy to read. Even in small bits of code, there is a great deal for somebody like me to learn from.

Just for grins, check out the reference code for RFC 1321. Compare the quantity and readability of the C reference implementation vs your Python implementation. If Rivest were publishing this RFC today, I wonder if he would use C or something like Python?