Finite Automata
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Finite-State Machines and Pushdown Automata
The finite-state machine (FSM) and the pushdown automaton (PDA) enjoy a special place in computer science. The FSM has proven to be a very useful model for many practical tasks and deserves to be among the tools of every practicing computer scientist. Many simple tasks, such as interpreting the commands typed into a keyboard or running a calculator, can be modeled by finite-state machines. The PDA is a model to which one appeals when writing compilers because it captures the essential architectural features needed to parse context-free languages, languages whose structure most closely resembles that of many programming languages. In this chapter we examine the language recognition capability of FSMs and PDAs. We show that FSMs recognize exactly the regular languages, languages defined by regular expressions and generated by regular grammars. We also provide an algorithm to find a FSM that is equivalent to a given FSM but has the fewest states. We examine language recognition by PDAs and show that PDAs recognize exactly the context-free languages, languages whose grammars satisfy less stringent requirements than regular grammars. Both regular and context-free grammar types are special cases of the phrasestructure grammars that are shown in Chapter 5 to be the languages accepted by Turing machines. It is desirable not only to classify languages by the architecture of machines that recognize them but also to have tests to show that a language is not of a particular type. For this reason we establish so-called pumping lemmas whose purpose is to show how strings in one language can be elongated or “pumped up.” Pumping up may reveal that a language does not fall into a presumed language category. We also develop other properties of languages that provide mechanisms for distinguishing among language types. Because of the importance of context-free languages, we examine how they are parsed, a key step in
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Finite-State Machines and Pushdown Automata
The finite-state machine (FSM) and the pushdown automaton (PDA) enjoy a special place in computer science. The FSM has proven to be a very useful model for many practical tasks and deserves to be among the tools of every practicing computer scientist. Many simple tasks, such as interpreting the commands typed into a keyboard or running a calculator, can be modeled by finite-state machines. The PDA is a model to which one appeals when writing compilers because it captures the essential architectural features needed to parse context-free languages, languages whose structure most closely resembles that of many programming languages. In this chapter we examine the language recognition capability of FSMs and PDAs. We show that FSMs recognize exactly the regular languages, languages defined by regular expressions and generated by regular grammars. We also provide an algorithm to find a FSM that is equivalent to a given FSM but has the fewest states. We examine language recognition by PDAs and show that PDAs recognize exactly the context-free languages, languages whose grammars satisfy less stringent requirements than regular grammars. Both regular and context-free grammar types are special cases of the phrasestructure grammars that are shown in Chapter 5 to be the languages accepted by Turing machines. It is desirable not only to classify languages by the architecture of machines that recognize them but also to have tests to show that a language is not of a particular type. For this reason we establish so-called pumping lemmas whose purpose is to show how strings in one language can be elongated or “pumped up.” Pumping up may reveal that a language does not fall into a presumed language category. We also develop other properties of languages that provide mechanisms for distinguishing among language types. Because of the importance of context-free languages, we examine how they are parsed, a key step in