Proposal: drop the comment and Atbash reference in the Affine Cipher markdown file.
The comment was added as a “comment” by @kotp 5 years ago and doesn’t show up in the rendered HTML.
- Although all monoalphabetic ciphers are weak, the affine cipher is much stronger than the Atbash cipher, because it has many more keys.
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- [comment]: # ( monoalphabetic as spelled by Merriam-Webster, compare to polyalphabetic )
+1.
As an aside, the prose doesn’t explain what monoalphabetic means. that becomes a problem because we suddenly compare it to the Atbash cipher which comes out of nowhere:
“Although all monoalphabetic ciphers are weak, the affine cipher is much stronger than the Atbash cipher, because it has many more keys.”
Presumably, the Atbash cipher is another example of a monoalphabetic cipher, but given we never defined what monoalphabetic ciphers are, this is a sentence we just have to accept at face value. Somehow the affine cipher has more keys (not yet introduced) than some other cipher that hasn’t been introduced yet and may or may not be monoalphabetic.
Should Affine even mention Atbash? We can drop that line, too.
I’d be in favor of that. :)
Proposal updated to indicate both removals.
+1 for both clean up steps.