News
From The Perl Formal Language Toolkit
06 August 2007
- Created a prototype interface for simpler command line usage, called fash. It is installed whenever FLAT is installed.
- Started on XFAs, which may utilized regular expressions as transitions. This will be used to implement the DFA->RE using state elimination.
15 February 2007
Implemented "one liners" and am currently evaluating DFA->RE and RE transformations similar to those available for symbolic math packages, but for regular expressions.
10 February 2007
After a short hiatus with development, I have embarked on a new set of goals. They are in no particular order:
1) Create a “Transform” module that will allow one to transform one’s regular expression (theoretical, not Perl regex necessarily) using a set of relations and properties of regular expressions.
For example, “a(b+c) => ab+bc“. While I have no idea how I am going to do this, I hope to when I am done. I am currently evaluating the Perl module, Math::Symbolic::Transformation. I don’t think I can do this stuff with the current facilities provided by FLaT, but after I get it working I may realized that there does.
2) Create a tool that provides a framework for generating regular expressions given a DFA. While there are no really good ways to do this (that I am aware of, anyway) I think I could atlease provide some interfaces and a base implementation to do this. This may be part of implementing FLAT::XFA, which will be an FA who’s edge labels are themselves regular expressions.
So, it looks like the current theme here is taking us closer to a tool kit that will now focus on getting regular expressions from FAs, which is where I’ve wanted to take this thing all along. Stay tuned!
