Hannay publishes a paper in Inroads-The SIGCSE Bulletin

David Hannay, professor of computer science, is to publish a paper, "Interactive Theory," in the December issue of Inroads-The SIGCSE Bulletin, (Vol. 34 No.4) the Computer Science Education journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. The web-based simulations encompass the six core abstract models of computation: finite-state, pushdown and Turing machines as well as regular expressions, context-free grammars, and recursive functions. All six simulations come packaged with predefined machines/expressions/grammars/functions. Users can also create machines/expressions/grammars/functions from scratch. Each of the machine simulations traces arbitrary input as processed by the machine. The regular expression simulator tests if an entered list of words are part of the language of a regular expression, and generates random words represented by an expression. The context-free grammar simulator also generates words in the corresponding language. Finally, the evaluation of functions can be traced to a user-specified depth of recursion. The simulators can be accessed at http://cs.union.edu/~hannayd/csc140/simulators.