consistent-hashing

Basically, I would want to implement the following algorithms and analyze how the system built using these algorithms behave under different conditions. Gossip protocol Multiple paxos Consistent hashing My interest here is in these algorithms. I basically am looking for a programming language that lets me write these algorithms quickly and deeply understand these algorithms. Which language should I choose? Java, Scala, Erlang or anything else. Currently, I know Java and C++. You could try implementing the protocols in Erlang. Process communication is very elegantly baked into the language and

I'm having a problem with MessageDigest returning different hash values on different computers. One computer is running 32-bit Java on Windows Vista and the other is running 64-bit Java on Mac OS. I'm not sure if it is because MessageDigest is machine dependent, or I need to explicitly specify a character encoding somewhere, or perhaps something else. Here's the code: public static boolean authenticate(String salt, String encryptedPassword, char[] plainTextPassword ) throws NoSuchAlgorithmException { // do I need to explcitly specify character encoding here? --> String