Languages are sets, so we can take any two languages (over the same alphabet) and take their union to form a new language. Just as a reminder: Definition 7 : The union of two sets L and K is the set with all the members found in either , and...

You probably intuitively understood concatenation already, but let me define it anyway. Definition 5 : The concatenation of two strings w and u (over the same alphabet) makes a string consisting of the sequence of every element in w followed...

Let's look at some sample languages to get a sense of just how flexible languages can be. For example, here are some languages over the alphabet S = { 0 , 1 } L 1 = all members of S*, period -- the language where every string is in the...

Over the years that I've been writing this blog some of the most positive feedback I've received has been for those entries where I've explored fundamental concepts in computer science. I thought that I might take that to its logical extreme, and...

I'm still learning my way around the C# codebase – heck, I'm still learning my way around the Jscript codebase and I've been working on it for nine years, not nine weeks. Here's something I stumbled across while refactoring the anonymous method binding...

A question I got recently was about access to protected methods from a derived class. Clearly that's what "protected" means – that you can access it from a derived class. In that case, why doesn't this work? class Ungulate { protected void Eat() {...

[No technology today, so if you're only here for the witty banter about programming languages, skip this one.] Leah and I spent the week before Halloween volunteering at Nightmare At Beaver Lake , a haunted-house-style attraction that runs along the...