AAAAA

AAAAA is an application for automata theory, especially meant to be used for educational purposes. It helps the student to investigate languages, create and debug regular expressions, finite automata, grammars, and so on. It even features an LR(1) parser generator in an easy-to-use setting, allowing the students to experiment with such tools without having to learn how to use tools as Yacc or Bison.

At Uppsala University, AAAAA has been used in the automata theory courses on the programs for Information Technology, for Computing Science, and for Mathematics.

The current version is AAAAA 11 ("two", not "eleven", since unary notation is common in automata theory). It is available under the GNU General Public Licence, and it currently runs on SunOS/Solaris, and on Linux.

It should be possible to compile it (with some effort) on Unix based systems with x86, Sparc, or PowerPC processors. I even suspect that with the right tools, it might compile on a certain non-unix-based x86 platform (you know the one I mean), but this has not been tested. In principle, AAAAA should be portable to any platform supporting GNU Prolog and Tcl/Tk, so it will likely become portable to other platforms as GNU Prolog becomes available for them.

Download

User manual (in PostScript).

SunOS/Solaris binary.

Linux binary (ix86's).

Linux binary (PowerPC).

Mac OS X binary. (Does not work right now for OS X 10.7 or higher)

Source files.

The simplest way to unpack, say, the source is:

gunzip -c aaaaa-11.tar.gz | tar xf -

1999-09-15, Anders Andersson