Interactive tools for computation theory
David G. Hannay · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 2002
The web-based simulations encompass the six core abstract models of computation: finite-state, pushdown and Turing machines as well as regular expressions, context-free grammars, and recursive functions. All six simulations come packaged with predefined machines/expressions/grammars/functions. Users can also create machines, expressions, grammars, and functions from scratch. Each machine simulation traces arbitrary input as processed by the machine. The regular expression simulator tests if an entered list of words is part of the language of a regular expression, and generates random words represented by an expression. The context-free grammar simulator also generates words in the corresponding language. Finally, one can trace the evaluation of functions to a user-specified depth of recursion.