RIPAL: Responsive and Intuitive Parsing for the Analysis of Language

Pages

What is a finite language?

Definition

A finite language is a language that contains a finite number of strings.

Specification

Because a finite language has a finite number of strings each of a finite length, it's easy to specify a finite language by simply listing out the strings that belong to it.

This can be done in the following format:

L = {s1, s2, ..., sn}

Examples

Example

L = {apple, banana, peach}

In this language, a string consists of a single symbol which is the name of a fruit.

Example

L = {00, 01, 10, 11}

This is the language of binary strings of length 2.

Example

L = {one hat, two shirts, three shoes}

This is a language of some quantifiers applying to articles of clothing.


GitHub Repository: https://github.com/bprollinson/ripal

Copyright © 2017 Brendan Rollinson-Lorimer