I See Dead Code

Some participants of this semester’s „Computational Linguistics” course (which is a code word for „10 different lecturers guide you through the wonderful world of algorithms and theoretical foundations of CoLi”) obviously lack a life and willfully extended their own homework assignment, writing small toolkits for finite state automata.

Surprisingly, all those toolkits were written in Python and made our C++-affine lecturer wonder if he probably should look into this language some more, apart from suggesting that we „maybe […] should get a life.”

So what does my toolkit do?

• Determinization of NFSAs to DFSAs
• Creation of DFAs from simple regular expressions
• Application of FSTs
• dot graph output for *FSAs

All in all, not very impressive, and not very hard. Still, if you like PyParsing and generator-expression-prone Python code, you might want to have look at the TinyFST code.