Automata

( Version <#Include SYSTEM "../version"> )
Manuel Delgado mdelgado@fc.up.pt http://www.fc.up.pt/cmup/mdelgado
Steve Linton sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~sal/
José João Morais josejoao@fc.up.pt
©right; 2004 by Manuel Delgado, Steve Linton and José Morais

We adopt the copyright regulations of &GAP; as detailed in the copyright notice in the &GAP; manual.
This work started in 1998, when the first author was in the LIAFA at the University of Paris 7, in a post-doc. Encouraged by J. E. Pin, he began the implementation in &GAP;3 of an algorithm obtained some time before to answer a question from the realm of Finite Semigroups proposed by J. Almeida. It is now part of a separate package: finsemi.

The first version of this package on automata was prepared by the first author who gave it the form of a &GAP; share package. In a second version, prepared by the first and third authors, many functions have been added and the performance of many of the existing ones has been improved. Further important improvements, specially concerning performance, have been achieved when the second author joined the group. Bug reports, suggestions and comments are, of course, welcome. Please contact any of the authors to this effect. Our e-mail addresses are mdelgado@fc.up.pt or sal@dcs.st-and.ac.uk or josejoao@fc.up.pt.
The first author wishes to acknowledge Cyril Nicaud and Paulo Varandas for their help in programming some functions of the very first version of this package. He wishes also to acknowledge useful discussions and comments by Cyril Nicaud, Vítor H. Fernandes, Jean-Eric Pin and Jorge Almeida.

The first author also acknowledges support of FCT through CMUP and the FCT and POCTI Project POCTI/32817/MAT/2000 which is funded in cooperation with the European Community Fund FEDER.

The third author acknowledges financial support of FCT and the POCTI program through a scholarship given by Centro de Matemática da Universidade do Porto.

The authors would like to thank Mark Kambites (http://www.theory.informatik.uni-kassel.de/~kambites/) for his contribution in finding bugs and making suggestions for the improvement of this package.
<#Include SYSTEM "introduction.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "automata.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "rational.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "aut-vs-rat.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "aut-func.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "finitelang.xml">
<#Include SYSTEM "graphs.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "drawing.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "foldings.xml">