1.4 FSAs in Prolog

Now we will see how to implement FSAs in Prolog. This is actually a misleading way to describe what we are going to do. For, although we have been talking about FSAs as machines, we are going to treat them as passive data structures that are manipulated by other programs.

Separating declarative and procedural information is often a good idea. In many cases, it makes it easier to understand what is going on in a program, to maintain a program, and to reuse information. In the chapter on Context Free Grammars (Chapter 5), we will learn more about why the machine oriented view is unattractive.

• 1.4.1 Representing FSAs in Prolog

• 1.4.2 A Recognizer and Generator for FSAs without Jump Arcs

• 1.4.3 A Recognizer and Generator for FSAs with Jump Arcs