A visual and interactive automata theory course with JFLAP 4.0

Abstract

We describe the instructional software JFLAP 4.0 and how it can be used to provide a hands-on formal languages and automata theory course. JFLAP 4.0 doubles the number of chapters worth of material from JFLAP 3.1, now covering topics from eleven of thirteen chapters for a semester course. JFLAP 4.0 has easier interactive approaches to previous topics and covers many new topics including three parsing algorithms, multi-tape Turing machines, L-systems, and grammar transformations.