Essential Coding Theory [pdf]

Also not as in "cryptography".

Just curious. I can see how anyone may confuse coding with programming. And coding is related to cryptography through information theory. But what makes you think of cryptography when you hear coding? How does that confusion arise?

Secret code E.g. The Enigma code.

Hmm.. I see what you mean. But I'm not able to relate to it personally. Whenever I hear enigma, the next word that comes to mind is 'cipher', not 'code'. The second word is 'algorithm' and still not 'code'. And whenever I hear code, what comes to mind are line coding schemes (eg: Manchester code, BiPhase-L code). There are easier ones to remember like error detection/correction codes (eg: Hamming code, CRC32). But I still think of line codes for some odd reason.

The problem with information theory is that it's very easy to get things mixed up hopelessly, unless you decide in advance what each term means. There are too many similar concepts with similar names.

In some languages, it may be more common than in English to refer to passwords with the counterpart word to "code" (e.g. "access code"). There's also the idea of a "coded"/"encoded"/"encrypted" message. "coding" ~ "secrecy" ~ "cryptography".

Encoding and encrypting is often used synonymously and many times simultaneously. Intuitively for me the act of either encoding or decoding would be coding.

Also not as in compression/decompression.

There are several textbooks that combine the two topics. I used this one when I was in school, for example:

"Coding Theory and Cryptography: The Essentials"

https://www.amazon.com/Coding-Theory-Cryptography-Essentials...

you can pretty much directly use error correcting codes to perform cryptography, however. :P

A little trickier to use them to program.

Is the term codebreaking familiar to you?

Same situation. I get it. But not able to relate to it personally. The term I use consistently for it is 'cryptanalysis'. I have done it for some very simple ciphers. But I don't remember using the term 'codebreaking' to describe it. I have also done 'decoding' in some cases. But those didn't have anything to do with ciphers or encryption.

There is a possibility that most people pick up those ideas from their everyday language, while I got mine from formal education (English isn't my first language, though my proficiency in English is higher than for my first language). Either that or I completely forgot those terms at some point in my life and got replaced with the formal terms instead. (It's a slightly puzzling personal peculiarity.)

There's nothing wrong with these terms, its just that in popular conversation, the "secret" code usage would be quite common. For instance I just googled "enigma machine documentary" and I've seen around twenty separate occurrences of "code" and only a single "cipher".

Yes. It's probably my personal peculiarity due to the way I originally learned and practiced it. Though, I wonder how it is for full-time practitioners of crypto design/analysis. Many of the terms are loaded and you've to be pretty careful about what you express and interpret.