carmi@ipla01.hac.com (Aviram Carmi) (03/20/91)
I appologize to the net for my previous posting of "A few questions about automata and languages". I did not intended to ask for solutions to those questions, but just to ask for references, because as part of the test we "may consult any book you wish but there should be no discussion concerning tese questions with any other human." I was trying to use the net as a research tool to find references and I posted some of the problems from the exam to try to ilustrate what references I was looking for, just like asking a reference librarian. I might not have phrased my request correctly, but I did not try to hide my identity and I knew that my professor and my classmates are reading the net. If I wanted to get answers to those questions without disclosing my identity, I could have used one of the many anonymous (project, guest) accounts I have access to, and which could not be traced back to me, and I would have rephrased the problems so that they would not be easily recognizable as comming directly from this particular take-home exam. I really enjoy using the net and have learned a lot reading articles and disccusions on it. This was one of my first postings to the net and I had no intention of misusing it. Since this was one of my first postings, I took one of the existing previous articles and used it as the framework for my article (using the "folowup" command). I think that is why my request was not phrased properly. I have canceled the article in question, and of the two replies that I received one was a reference to a book: > > Have you tried Hopcroft and Ullman's "Formal Languages and their >relation to Automata" Addison-Wesley 1969? Its a compact reference to >the subject and deals with "what happens with unions of..." type >questions. > and the other was a question from someone who did not understand one of the problems: > >Isn't any set of strings that can appear on the stack of a PDA >trivially regular, since it is finite? Or am I missing something? > Again, I am sorry I did not make myself clear about my request, and that I really did not treat the net as "another human" but as a resource or as a research tool. I was trying to use the net as a very knowledgable librarian asking it (him/her?) for references on a particular problem, which, as I understood from the directions, was allowed. Thanks, Avi -- Avi Carmi EMail: carmi@ipla01.hac.com Phone: (818) 702-3179