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I don't think there are a lot of direct practical applications, outside of regular expressions for string search as others have mentioned. This is a building bl
by bo1024 6y ago
I don't think there are a lot of direct practical applications, outside of regular expressions for string search as others have mentioned. This is a building block to more advanced topics, some of which have practical applications. Theory of designing programming languages, and computational complexity theory. For instance, these are like baby steps toward P vs NP.
- bo1024 6y agoAnother reason this subject is taught, besides the topics themselves, is that it develops your logical reasoning, abstraction, and visualization muscles. For example the first problem, he has to argue that L concatenated with L-reversed is regular, and he uses general properties of regular languages to do it. Then to argue the prefix and suffix parts, he has to utilize the automaton for L by making copies of it and drawing transitions between them. A final example is the famous and dreaded "pumping lemma" that gives practice understanding alternating quantifiers: there exists a such that for all b, ....
- dependenttypes 6y agoDFAs are used on all kind of things, including on protocol design and implementation.