Automata Theory: building a RegExp machine

Course overview

State machines — the fundamental concept used today in many practical applications, starting from UI programming in React, automated reply systems, lexical analysis in parsers and formal language theory — i.e. the RegExp machines, — and up to real life use cases, such as simple traffic lights, vending machines, and others.

The state machines are backed by the larger theoretical field of computer science known as Theory of Computation, and also by its direct theoretical model — the Automata Theory.

In this class we study the Automata Theory on the practical example of implementing a Regular Expressions machine.

See also: Essentials of Garbage Collectors class devoted to automatic memory management.

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Essentials of Garbage Collectors

Course overview

Memory leaks and dangling pointers are the main issues of the manual memory management. You delete a parent node in a linked list, forgetting to delete all its children first — and your memory is leaking. You delete an object chain in correct order — but suddenly your program crashes since you forgot about second owner of this resource, which now tries to dereference a null-pointer.

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Essentials of interpretation. Checkpoint: part 1

This article describes in some details our interpreter which we have created during the course Essentials of interpretation. We summarize intermediate results and the main parts of the evaluator making notes which were omitted in the code articles. Continue reading →

Essentials of interpretation. Intro.

“Essentials of interpretation” is a new series which consists of small lessons on interpretation of computer programs. The lessons are implemented in JavaScript and contain detailed comments. The sources can be found on the appropriate GitHub repository.

Available lessons:

Notes:

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