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01-Alphabets and Languages Class3

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11 views7 pages

01-Alphabets and Languages Class3

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jaiya.chauhan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Alphabets and Languages:

the mathematics of strings


CSC320
Strings and symbols
• An alphabet is a finite set of symbols, e.g., the binary or Roman alphabet. We
denote an arbitrary alphabet by Σ
• A string over an alphabet is a finite sequence of symbols from the alphabet.
• The empty string is the string with no symbols and is denoted ".
• The set of all strings, including the empty string, over an alphabet is denoted Σ ∗ .
• What is the cardinality of Σ ∗?
• The length of a string is its length as a sequence.
• There is only one string of length 0. What is it?
• The length of a string $ is denoted |$|.
• A string w of length n canbe denoted w1 w2 …wn . The symbol in the &th position
is denoted $' . We say that symbol $' occurs in position &. A symbol may have
more than one occurrence in a string.
Operations and relations on strings
• The operation of concatenation takes two string ! and " and
produces a new string !" by putting them together end to end. The
string !" is called the concatenation of ! and ".
• Concatenation is an associative operation. So we will write, e.g., !"# for
!" # or !("#)
• A string & is a substring of a string ' iff there are strings ! and " such
that ' = !&". If " = ) then & is a suffix of '. If ! = ) then & is a
prefix of '.
• We write ! * for the string obtained by concatenating + copies of !.
• The reversal of a string ', denoted ' , is the string ' “written
backwards”.
Languages: Sets of strings
• A language is set of strings over an alphabet.
• We may apply set operations like union, intersection, and set
difference to languages.
∗
• The complement of a language ! is Σ −!, and is denoted !̅ if Σ is
understood.
• If '( and ') are languages over Σ, their concatenation is

' = {, ∈ Σ ∗ ∶ , = /0 for some / ∈ '( and 0 ∈ ') }

• Denoted '( · ') or '( ')


Kleene star

• The (Kleene) star of a language !, denoted !∗ is the set of all strings


obtained by concatenating zero or more strings from !. Thus,

!∗ = $ ∈ Σ ∗ ∶ $ = $( $) … $+ for some 2 ≥ 0 567 $8 9 !

• Examples: The star of Σ is Σ ∗ ; The star of ∅ is 9


• !; denotes !!∗ and is the closure of ! under concatenation. That is, it
is the smallest language that includes ! and all strings that are
concatenations of strings in !.
Representing a language with a finite
specification
• The vast majority of languages over a finite alphabet cannot be
represented by a finite specification.
• Why not?
• The set Σ ∗ of strings over a finite alphabet Σ is countably infinite, (i.e., we can
construct a bijection #: ℕ → Σ ∗ )
• A specification for a language is given by a string over a finite alphabet.
Therefore, the set of specifications countably infinite, or even finite.
• But the set of possible languages is the set of subsets of Σ ∗ , i.e., it is the
power set of a countably infinite set. It is therefore uncountably infinite
(Cantor’s argument.)
• What languages can we specify? This is the primary question we will
address in this course
Languages and Problems
• Recall from the first lecture that we said we will be concerned with
computational solutions to problems.
• A problem is a mapping from problem instances to !"#, %&.
• Languages may be viewed as an abstract representation of problems.
For a problem Π, the associated language is

() = {, ∈ Σ ∗ : , is a !"# instance of Π}

• So studying “specifiable” languages is analogous to studying


“solvable” problems.

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