1 Languages

2 A language is a set of strings String: A sequence of letters Examples: “cat”, “dog”, “house”, … Defined over an alphabet:

3 Alphabets and Strings We will use small alphabets: Strings

4 String Operations Concatenation

5 Reverse

6 String Length Length: Examples:

7 Length of Concatenation Example:

8 Empty String A string with no letters: Observations:

9 Substring Substring of string: a subsequence of consecutive characters String Substring

10 Prefix and Suffix Prefixes Suffixes prefix suffix

11 Another Operation Example: Definition:

12 The * Operation : the set of all possible strings from alphabet

13 The + Operation : the set of all possible strings from alphabet except

14 Languages A language is any subset of Example: Languages:

15 Note that: Sets Set size String length

16 Another Example An infinite language

17 Operations on Languages The usual set operations Complement:

18 Reverse Definition: Examples:

19 Concatenation Definition: Example:

20 Another Operation Definition: Special case:

21 More Examples

22 Star-Closure (Kleene *) Definition: Example:

23 Positive Closure Definition:

24 Exercise {a,ba}*