Introduction to Languages, Machines and Logic: Computable Languages, Abstract Machines and Formal Logic / Edition 1

by Alan P. Parkes

Overview

1.1 Overview This chapter briefly describes: • what this book is about • what this book tries to do • what this book tries not to do • a useful feature of the book: the exercises. 1.2 What This Book Is About This book is about three key topics of computer science, namely computable languages, abstract machines, and logic. Computable languages are related to what are usually known as "formal languages". I avoid using the latter phrase here because later on in the book I distin­ guish between formal languages and computable languages. In fact, computable languages are a special type of formal languages that can be processed, in ways considered in this book, by computers, or rather abstract machines that represent computers. Abstract machines are formal computing devices that we use to investigate properties of real computing devices. The term that is sometimes used to describe abstract machines is automata, but that sounds too much like real machines, in particular the type of machines we call robots. The logic part of the book considers using different types of formal logic to represent things and reason about them. The logics we consider all play a very important role in computing. They are Boolean logic, propositional logic, and first order predicate logic (FOPL).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852334642
Publisher:	Springer London
Publication date:	06/20/2002
Edition description:	2002
Pages:	351
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.36(d)

Table of Contents

1 Introduction.- Overview.- What This Book Is About.- What This Book Tries to Do.- What This Book Tries Not to Do.- The Exercises.- Further Reading.- Some Advice.- 1 Languages and Machines.- 2 Elements of Formal Languages.- 3 Syntax, Semantics, and Ambiguity.- 4 Regular Languages and Finite State Recognisers.- 5 Context Free Languages and Pushdown Recognisers.- 6 Important Features of Regular and Context Free Languages.- 7 Phrase Structure Languages and Turing Machines.- 2 Machines and Computation.- 8 Finite State Transducers.- 9 Turing Machines as Computers.- 10 Turing’s Thesis and the Universality of the Turing Machine.- 11 Computability, Solvability, and the Halting Problem.- 12 Dimensions of Computation.- 3 Computation and Logic.- 13 Boolean Logic and Propositional Logic.- 14 First Order Predicate Logic.- 15 Logic and Computation.- Solutions to Selected Exercises.- 2.- 3.- 4.- 5.- 6.- 7.- 8.- 9.- 10.- 11.- 12.- 13.- 14.- 15.- Further Reading.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews:

"The book is accessible to students with limited mathematical training … . The text is illustrated with nice pictures; there are many exercises and some of them have sketchy solutions grouped in a special section. The book also includes comments on further readings and a good index." (Cristian S. Calude, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1041 (16), 2004)

From the Publisher