CIAA2003

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Introducing Vaucanson

Sylvain Lombardy, Raphael Poss, Yann Regis-Gianas, Jacques Sakarovitch

Presented at Eighth International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA 2003), July 16-18, 2003 Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Abstract

This paper reports on a new software platform dedicated to the computation with automata and transducers, called Vaucanson, the main feature of which is the capacity of dealing with automata whose labels may belong to various algebraic structures. The paper successively shows how Vaucanson allows to program algorithms on automata in a way which is very close to the mathematical expression of the algorithm, describes some features of the Vaucanson platform, including the fact that the very rich data structure used to implement automata does not weight too much on the performance and finally explains the main issues of the programming design that allow to achieve both genericity and efficiency.