Introduction to Vaucanson

Date: 2005-01-15

Vaucanson, a C++ generic library for weighted finite state machine.

Contents

Overview

Firstly initiated by Jacques Sakarovitch in 2000, Vaucanson is a project developed by the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications [1] and the EPITA Research and Development Laboratory (LRDE) [2].

[1]http://www.enst.fr
[2]http://www.lrde.epita.fr

The goal of this library is to enable the development of C++ programs in an abstract and general way with, at the same time, a large specialization power. Indeed, on the one hand, we can write algorithms working on every automaton with weights over any semirings and with words from any free monoids. And on the other hand, a particular algorithm can be specialized for a particular data structure implementing only a pseudo behaviour.

Yet, Vaucanson is an ongoing development project. Therefore algorithms, data structures and the general architecture are not totally stable and well tested.

In the doc/help directory, you can find a short howto to start programming with Vaucanson. The src directory contains several demonstrations, but you can also look at the include/vaucanson/algorithms to be introduced to the basics of Vaucanson.

Please send any question or comments to vaucanson@lrde.epita.fr, and bug reports to vaucanson-bugs@lrde.epita.fr.

Installation

See the documentation file INSTALL.txt for installation instructions.

See Also

There are other sources of interest in the distribution.

[3]http://www.research.att.com/~mohri/fsm/

Licence

Vaucanson is released under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. See the file COPYING (at the root of the source tree) for details.

Contacts

The team can be reached by mail at vaucanson@lrde.epita.fr. Snail mail addresses follow.