Abstract
Strings are sequences on which some specific operations are defined. The most important operation over strings is the concatenation. If α and β are two strings, their concatenation, usually denoted by αβ, is the sequence where the last element of α is followed by the elements of β, in the order they have in β. Formal languages are sets of strings. In this chapter we present some basic concepts of formal language theory: languages, grammars, automata, expressions, and patterns. We conclude by outlining the notions of decidability and undecidability, and with two famous kinds of computation automata: Turing machines and register machines.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Manca, V. (2013). Languages and Grammars. In: Infobiotics. Emergence, Complexity and Computation, vol 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36223-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36223-1_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36222-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36223-1
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