# Vaucanson Documentation

### 1.3.9

## The Vaucanson Project

Vaucanson is a finite state machine manipulation platform, composed of a library and tools implemented on top of it. It benefits from the expertize we capitalized during our intensive work on high performance generic programming for Olena. On the other hand, its theoretical wellfoundness in the area of automata is ensured thanks to a collaborative work with Jacques Sakarovitch, at the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (ENST).

See also the Vaucanson home page, http://vaucanson.lrde.epita.fr.

## Purpose of this documentation

This documentation aims at being used as a reference manual for Vaucanson. Its purpose is to describe exhaustively the definitions of:

- Meta-programmation tools
- Algebra constructs and operators
- Automaton structures
- Algorithms

It is not a tutorial and should contain little or no example of uses of the library. A separate tutorial and source examples are available in the source code distribution.

Note: this documentation is also a work in progress. This means that while we are working our best to document every aspect of the library, the documentation is not yet complete. This also means that more structures and algorithms are available in the library than those currently documented. For an extensive listing of all the available algorithms, browse the `include/vaucanson/algorithms` source directory.

## How to read

This documentation is separated into "chapters" each describing the library under a different point of view.

- Modules are the different categories used to classify the features of the library.

- The class list, index and hierarchy describe the different data structures.

- The Fundamental section describes the peculiar design pattern used in Vaucanson.

- The algebra constructs listing describe the algebraic system used by the library.

- The automaton constructs listing describe the different automaton structures available.

- The algorithm listing describe the different algorithms.

- The file listing lists all the source files together with their documentation.