The Forlan Project (Version 4.15): Older News

Older News

Version 4.10

Generalized eliminateVariable to work when variable to be elminated has multiple productions (without self-recursion). Continuing revision of book.

Version 4.9

Added two functions for hand-simplification of grammars to Gram module (see the manual and book for descriptions of eliminateVariable and restart). Continuing revision of book.

Version 4.8

Improved documentation of local and global regular expression simplification. Continuing revision of book.

Version 4.7

Added functions to StrSet for prefix, suffix and substring closure. Minor documentation changes. Starting revision of book.

Version 4.6

Bringing Forlan up-to-date with most recent SML/NJ compiler (110.82).

Version 4.5

This release includes Version 2.1 of JForlan, which fixes a minor bug relating to regular expression tree error checking and includes the changes needed to make JForlan build using Apache Ant.

Version 4.4

This release features a new draft (September 2012) of the textbook, as well as some minor changes and additions to the Forlan toolset and manual. The RFA module of the toolset now exports functions for standardizing an RFA and for converting an RFA to a regular expression.

Version 4.3

This release features a new draft (August 2012) of the textbook, as well as some relatively minor changes and additions to the Forlan toolset and manual. Most significantly, the textbook now includes a draft of Chapter 5, which uses a functional programming language to study the recursive and recursively enumerable languages. I believe that the toolset is now in close to final form. The textbook should be usable, but still needs substantial work.

Version 4.2

This release features changes to Forlan, JForlan, the Forlan manual, and the draft textbook. Major changes have been made to Forlan's simplification algorithms for regular expressions, small changes have been made to the simplification algorithms for finite automata and grammars, and the parsing algorithm for context-free grammars has been improved. The new release (Version 2.0) of JForlan contains numerous bug fixes and changes of functionality. Error checking is now always turned on, and if there are no errors, the Forlan syntax of the current project's automaton or tree is displayed. Projects now have a committable boolean attribute, which is true exactly when the project originated from Forlan. Only committable projects may be committed back to Forlan. There is now a full draft of the Forlan manual. The draft textbook is now consistent with the toolset, and contains all the material that was only in the lecture slides in Version 4.1. Those lecture slides are no longer part of the Forlan release.

Version 4.1

This release features small changes to the Forlan toolset's lexical analyzer.

Version 4.0

This release features a completely redesigned and redeveloped version of JForlan (Version 1.0), the graphical editor for Forlan automata and trees.