Abstract

. This paper addresses the problem of building a Boolean dataflow network (sequential circuit) recognizing the language described by a regular expression. The main result is that both the construction time and the size of the resulting network are linear with respect to the size of the regular expression. Introduction "Grep" machine: Let \Sigma be a vocabulary, L be a regular language on \Sigma . A "grep" machine is a machine receiving a sequence s 0 ; s 1 ; : : : ; s n ; : : : of symbols (s i 2 \Sigma ) and computing a sequence b 0 ; b 1 ; : : : ; b n ; : : : of Booleans, such that b n is true if and only if the word s 0 s 1 : : : s n belongs to L 2 . This paper addresses the problem of building a "grep" machine for languages described by regular expressions. This problem is rather classical [4, 11, 10, 3, 1, 2]. We propose a solution which, to our knowledge, is new: Informally, it consists of building, from a regular expression E, a "circuit" (or Boolean data-flow network) explori...

Citations

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