# Atbash Cipher Create an implementation of the atbash cipher, an ancient encryption system created in the Middle East. The Atbash cipher is a simple substitution cipher that relies on transposing all the letters in the alphabet such that the resulting alphabet is backwards. The first letter is replaced with the last letter, the second with the second-last, and so on. An Atbash cipher for the Latin alphabet would be as follows: ```text Plain: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Cipher: zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba ``` It is a very weak cipher because it only has one possible key, and it is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. However, this may not have been an issue in the cipher's time. Ciphertext is written out in groups of fixed length, the traditional group size being 5 letters, and punctuation is excluded. This is to make it harder to guess things based on word boundaries. ## Examples - Encoding `test` gives `gvhg` - Decoding `gvhg` gives `test` - Decoding `gsvjf rxpyi ldmul cqfnk hlevi gsvoz abwlt` gives `thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog` ## Setup Check out [Exercism Help](http://exercism.io/languages/common-lisp) for instructions to get started writing Common Lisp. That page will explain how to install and setup a Lisp implementation and how to run the tests. ## Formatting While Common Lisp doesn't care about indentation and layout of code, nor whether you use spaces or tabs, this is an important consideration for submissions to exercism.io. Excercism.io's code widget cannot handle mixing of tab and space characters well so using only spaces is recommended to make the code more readable to the human reviewers. Please review your editors settings on how to accomplish this. Below are instructions for popular editors for Common Lisp. ### VIM Use the following commands to ensure VIM uses only spaces for indentation: ```vimscript :set tabstop=2 :set shiftwidth=2 :set expandtab ``` (or as a oneliner `:set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab`). This can be added to your `~/.vimrc` file to use it all the time. ### Emacs Emacs is very well suited for editing Common Lisp and has many powerful add-on packages available. The only thing that one needs to do with a stock emacs to make it work well with exercism.io is to evaluate the following code: `(setq indent-tab-mode nil)` This can be placed in your `~/.emacs` (or `~/.emacs.d/init.el`) in order to have it set whenever Emacs is launched. One suggested add-on for Emacs and Common Lisp is [SLIME](https://github.com/slime/slime) which offers tight integration with the REPL; making iterative coding and testing very easy. ## Source Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atbash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atbash) ## Submitting Incomplete Solutions It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.