Michael G Schwern wrote:
crypt() doesn't really encrypt, it hashes or digests.

"encrypt" is a generic term. "hash" or "digest" are specific methods. More importantly for the purposes of documentation, at least on my system, I see this:

$ man crypt

NAME
       crypt - password and data encryption

SYNOPSIS
       #define _XOPEN_SOURCE
       #include <unistd.h>

       char *crypt(const char *key, const char *salt);

DESCRIPTION
       crypt  is  the  password  encryption function.  It is based on the Data
       Encryption Standard algorithm with  variations  intended  (among  other
       things)  to discourage use of hardware implementations of a key search.
...

So I think that trying to discuss the actual method used in the Perl documentation is really going beyond what we need to do. We could mention that DES isn't all that secure, but trying to differentiate between different encryption methods is outside of our scope (IMNSHO)...

John

--
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
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