Tool support for the study of automata and grammars

Question

I'm studying Formal languages ​​and compilers, and I'm doing a little bit hard to understand everything. Is there a tool that allows you to create automata and grammars and perform operations on them? Operations such as: minimize an automaton by automaton grammar, from grammar to automaton, make an epsilon-free grammar, etc.

Thank you very much

Answer 1

The Prolog-based Finite State Automata Utilities mentionned by rici seem a bit outdated and the online demo does not work, but it seems that there is some available precompiled binaries.

I used to make some experimentations with JFLAP a more recent Java based tool that is still maintained.

(BTW, asking for tools is off-topic on SO, as it is not an implementation question.)

Answer 2

Take a look at L-FLAT, a Logtalk Toolkit for Formal Languages and Automata Theory. You can run it most Prolog compilers:

https://code.google.com/p/lflat/

It includes several examples of defining and operating on automata. There's also a paper about the system that you can download from:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3783