&automata;

A package on automata

Version <#Include SYSTEM "../version">
Manuel Delgado

    Departamento de Matemática - Faculdade de Ciências

    Porto

    Portugal

mdelgado@fc.up.pt http://www.fc.up.pt/cmup/mdelgado/
Steve Linton

    School of Computer Science

    University of St Andrews

    Jack Cole Building, North Haugh

    St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9SX

    United Kingdom

steve.linton@st-andrews.ac.uk http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~sal/
José João Morais

    No address known

©right; 2004 by Manuel Delgado, Steve Linton and José Morais

\noindent &automata; package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. For details, see the file 'GPL' included in the package or see the FSF's own site.
The first author wishes to acknowledge Cyril Nicaud and Paulo Varandas for their help in programming some functions of the very first version of this package. He wishes also to acknowledge useful discussions and comments by Cyril Nicaud, Vítor H. Fernandes, Jean-Eric Pin and Jorge Almeida.

The first author also acknowledges support of FCT through CMUP and the FCT and POCTI Project POCTI/32817/MAT/2000 which is funded in cooperation with the European Community Fund FEDER.

The third author acknowledges financial support of FCT and the POCTI program through a scholarship given by Centro de Matemática da Universidade do Porto.

The authors would like to thank Mark Kambites for his contribution in finding bugs and making suggestions for the improvement of this package.

Concerning the maintenance:

The first author was/is (partially) supported by:

the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) project PTDC/MAT/65481/2006;

the Centro de Matemática da Universidade do Porto (CMUP), in particular for those periods in which CMUP was funded by

the European Regional Development Fund through the program COMPETE and by the Portuguese Government through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under the project PEst-C/MAT/UI0144/2011;

FCT (Portugal) with national (MEC) and European structural funds through the programs FEDER, under the partnership agreement PT2020, under the project UID/MAT/00144/2013.
This work started in 1998, when the first author was in the LIAFA at the University of Paris 7, in a post-doc. Encouraged by J. E. Pin, he began the implementation in &GAP;3 of an algorithm obtained some time before to answer a question from the realm of Finite Semigroups proposed by J. Almeida.

The first version of this package on automata was prepared by the first author who gave it the form of a &GAP; share package. In a second version, prepared by the first and third authors, many functions have been added and the performance of many of the existing ones has been improved. Further important improvements, specially concerning performance, have been achieved when the second author joined the group. The first author is particularly grateful to Max Horn whose help made the release of Version 1.14 a lot easier.

Since Version 1.12, the package is maintained by the first two authors. Bug reports, suggestions and comments are, of course, welcome. Please use our email addresses to this effect.
<#Include SYSTEM "introduction.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "automata.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "rational.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "aut-vs-rat.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "aut-func.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "finitelang.xml">
<#Include SYSTEM "graphs.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "drawing.xml"> <#Include SYSTEM "foldings.xml">